[med-svn] r13060 - trunk/community/interview

Fri Feb 22 17:23:22 UTC 2013

Author: tille
Date: 2013-02-22 17:23:21 +0000 (Fri, 22 Feb 2013)
New Revision: 13060

Modified:
   trunk/community/interview/interview_r.nair-a.tille.log
Log:
Continued interview


Modified: trunk/community/interview/interview_r.nair-a.tille.log
===================================================================

--- trunk/community/interview/interview_r.nair-a.tille.log	2013-02-22 09:07:06 UTC (rev 13059)
+++ trunk/community/interview/interview_r.nair-a.tille.log	2013-02-22 17:23:21 UTC (rev 13060)
@@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
 Interview between Rajeev Nair <rajeevisonline at gmail.com> (RN) and
 Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org (AT) at So, 17.02.2013
+Rajeev Nair is Business head of http://www.healthcafe.in
 
 RN: Hi Andreas are you free now?
 AT: Fine for me to talk right now
@@ -297,4 +298,91 @@
    bye
    take care
 AT: bye
- 
+
+
+Continued interview at Mo, 18.02.2013
+
+RN: lets pick off from where we stopped.. you were talking about "Debian Science"
+    and about creating a fork..
+AT: If I remember correctly my point was that my presentation are obviosly not as good as I wanted them to be if I intend to explain in detail that Blends (in this case Debian Science) are no fork and the first question in the QA part is "Why do you fork Debian?"
+RN: yes
+RN: but what was the presentation about Debian Science?
+RN: is it related to Debian Med?
+    ok it is a pure blend like debian med?
+AT: Well, Debian Science is another pure Blend (like also Debian Edu, DebiChem, Debian GIS, Debian Multimedia)
+    However, it is more like an umbrella project from where more specific Blends (like potentially Debian Math, Debian Physics, Debian Electronics - whatever might come out of this if people might start to care about this)
+    For the momen Debian Science assembles a lot of scientists packaging several kind of scientific software.
+RN: and you are maintaining that as well...
+RN: I mean maintaining Debian Science too
+AT: Well, I have a few packages in Debian Science (for instance wordnet) and I was activ in the process of forming the Blend and I'm lurking on the mailing lists - we are just somehow connected.  However, my spare time does not enable me to be very active in more than one project.
+    I just had some talks about Debian Science in the past which is not that a big deal because it is handled with the same Blends tools and following the same principles.
+RN: Is there any government initiative to support Debian Med in any way that you know of? any organization?
+AT: No, not that I would be aware of.
+RN: I mean in Germany or elsewhere in the world or any other govt?
+AT: The only really large scale Free Software in Medicine installations are some hospitals running VistA
+    There came up some universities who are supporting Debian Med in their BioInformatics branch to som extend.
+    I'm not aware of any governmental support
+RN: do you know of any universities spec?
+AT: IMHO one of our team members is professor at University of Munich
+    But if you want to be sure you would be best advised to ask on our mailing list <debian-med at lists.debian.org>
+    It might perfectly be that I'm not fully informed about this.
+    Youo know: Free software can be picked by anybody and there is no requirement to let us know.
+    I really can not tell to what extend the support / usage is "official"
+AT: I can only say pretty sure that there is explicitely no support by German government for Debian Med (I'm working on an institut that is attached to the ministry of health and it is not used here.)
+RN: do you think reliability is an issue people are scared to move into a new area or lack expertise to handle it?
+AT: The reasons are complex and you are mentioning only a part of it.  I do not think that I could give a concise overview about those reasons here.  Debian Med is just another Free Software project amongst a whole lot of other very reasonable projects - non of them gets governmental support.  So why do you expect Debian Med to be supportet specifically?
+RN: because
+    1) It is a medical project..concerns the health of citizens
+    2) could minimize costs in third world countries
+    3) free support from the web..assuming that it is possible
+    4) Debian is freely available and the most popular linux available
+AT: So do you want to discuss this with your / other governments. I know these reasons but I spend my time in making Debian Med better instead of talking to politicians.  I consider lobbying something as a very boring job - specifically if you have no money to spend for your lobbyism.
+RN: yeah I think we ought to project debain-med to governments...conduct workshops for healthcare etc..
+    would be a good thing...we have done so much already..why not go the extra mile?
+    it is a good thing after all we're not terrorists or anything..
+RN: :)
+AT: I will not stop anybody from doing what you are proposing - at the contrary, I'd be happy about this.  But this is not my business.  I can do and I have fun to do a lot of technical work and I can talk on technical conferences.  I will not cut from this time for other things.
+RN: ok it would be great if we could chalk out a plan of action..some policies that people can follow and how debian-med can help
+    unfortunately for the governement reps must actually sit and discuss with maintanence and packaging team(yourself) and upstream..
+    After all so much of work has actually gone into free software right?
+    I think we must market it more agressively as a matter of principle
+    like spreading non violence... green peace etc...
+    an actual movement with free software...
+    where it stops being an idea and becomes a revolution
+RN: I dont know what people constitute our govts...but if I saw an initiative like this Id promote it
+RN: anyway thats how that stands I dont want to bore you
+    let us talk about something else
+    How many people are currently working in your Debian-Med team?
+    Are there any people from India?
+AT: It is always hard to say how many people are working because you need to define first what amount counts as work and how long the time span of inactivity could be to say qualify as "recent work"
+    I was wondering about this question since some time and cam up with graphics you probably have seen in my FOSDEM talk
+AT: The graohs shows the ten most active people and I think for the Debian Med team the graph would be interesting even for the top twenty active people.  Considering that probably a >30 people graph would not tell much new things you might consider the Debian Med team of about 20 to 25 people.
+    (people = active people in terms of providing code and discuss actively on the mailing lists)
+AT: Regarding people from India:  Yes, my current MoM student (https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM) Sukhbir Singh is from India (but moved to Canada last year)
+RN: How do you go about packaging in debian? Do you actually obtain source code?
+    I mean for Debian-Med..
+AT: As any normal packaging:  Download the source from the internet, check the license, do the packaging (in VCS - we are a team), upload to Debian mirror.  Fully normal, nothing at all specific to the topic.
+    We are not developing any software on our own (at least not with the Debian developer hat on - there are some members in our team who are also upstream developers of some software.)
+RN: Well it is a great thing you're doing...the packages in yellow...they are there because of missing dependencies or because projects are not supported anymore?
+AT: In most cases it is just a lack of manpower.  (Do you want to start working on this ;-))
+RN: I would love to but I am not an expert you know that...
+    :)
+    And I am spending way too much time bringing my articles to completion for the magazine..
+    I used to work on linux extensively earlier but have been out of touch for a while now
+AT: Yep.  This question was just to make you understand why I do not dive into advertising Debian Med to politicans - I would simply just need to leave my workfield ... and I would hate to exchange something I do enjoy by something I do not like.
+    You just spend your time in what  you feel good in ... and I do so as well.
+RN: but we can always arrive at an amicable solution that is for the good of everyone rite?
+    I agree with you totally..now that I think about it
+AT: ... by sharing the work to do between experts.
+RN: ok I agree...hows the article panning out by the way?
+RN: Do you think that you can write something for our magazine..so as to make Debain-Med more appealing to all of us at least in print..somethings that can be done..anything that you can think up really...:)
+    we can have  a picture of the entire team as well on the following page
+AT: As I said I will try to spend the traveling time to and from our sprint meeting.  I'll let you know after next weekend.  Everything will be available via SVN so you can check
+RN: ok...
+    and you would discuss something at least related to policy and how healthcare can be improved just for the sake of the article...
+    please dont say no
+RN: :)
+RN: all right let it be as it may..but please let it be so that any health technician reading it is drawn to it
+    thanks and bye
+    we'll talk later
+    take care


