In article <89olm2$39s$1 at niobium.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk>, ptribble at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk
(Peter C. Tribble) wrote:
> In article <89ognt$neb$2 at bagan.srce.hr>,
> Damir Zucic <zucic at drava.etfos.hr> writes:
> >
> > In just few years, the amount of free and commercial software for
bioinformatics
> > on Linux will be significantly larger. I will, for example, release a free,
> > open source molecular visualisation program, which will be capable to load
> > large macromolecules, show it in different ways etc...
>> Which has nothing to do with Linux, as any competently written program
> will run on the regular unix flavours as well. (And vice-versa.)
However, distributors who supply binary-only programs still neglect
Linux at the moment so I believe Damir was indicating that this may
change in the future.
This also highlights one of the other advantages of Linux (and *BSD
distributions) occupying a larger mindset - a wider appreciation of
open source software. Certainly people in the past would happily
hand out source code for bioinformatics-related programs but only
those with access to UNIX boxes would have the chance to run them.
As Linux has taken hold the open source philosophy has also been
propagated so even if you are running a commercial OS (even if
freely distributed like Solaris) you are (hopefully) more likely
to share your code.
Bernard
P.S. Garlic looks real nice, Damir.
--
Bernard P. Murray, PhD
bpmurray at cgl . ucsf . edu
Department of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology, UCSF
