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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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2004-12-28EDOS Integrates Open-Source SoftwareACM News Service: Researchers Get EU Funding for Linux Project. This is a new European Union university and industry research project to ease the distribution and management of Linux-based software. This blurb suggests that it is focused on distributions of Linux itself, though this seems confused. The 30-month project will have deliverables every six months, and it is focused on peer-to-peer distributed operation and on an automated quality testing suite. It is difficult to see how the first applies, though I find the second quite interesting. I wonder how much of this really has to be tied to Linux, too. James Niccolai's 2004-12-22 ComputerWorld article seems broader, with attention on "building software development and management tools that will cut the costs of large open-source projects," with an eye toward doing "complex IT projects based on Linux and other open-source software." That makes far more sense. The emphasis on open-source (equated with Linux in Europe) is partly ideological and political for Europe, which sees it as a way to foster an independent European IT competency. It appears that the envisioned P2P application is with regard to automatic installation and updating, so it seems to be about distribution in the sense of deployment and configuration, not necessarily distributed-object operation. Dealing with interdependencies of components and the version status of them all is recognized as part of the challenge. «"Testing a Linux OS, or indeed any large application built on free/open-source software is a time-consuming and essential operation. Part of [our] plan is to develop tools to make testing more efficient and more comprehensive," the group said in its statement.» is still odd. It is not clear to me what about use of free/open-source software is peculiar to this problem. I am willing to believe there is something here, but it also strikes me that using open-source software also makes coordinated quality testing possible. It seems much trickier when there are proprietary, closed-source components in the mix. I would think that this kind of effort will break the hearts of some Microsoft developers, because it is easy to see a lot of wheels being reinvented here with other good experiences, including lessons about what doesn't work so well, being ignored. I imagine it goes back farther than Microsoft, too. I suppose my biggest concern is that these Euro-centric efforts are tending to be insular, and I'm not sure how that will be beneficial in the long run. At the same time, I welcome a visible, open activity in this area.
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