On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 01:21:18PM +0100, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
While I agree the logical and lofty goal would be to create a "Linux Medical Taskforce" I also know that doing so will not achieve anything tangible.
Over the > 10 years of Debian Med I observed several metaprojects that tried to some extend creating a tasks force or uniting medical care FLOSS projects. I also learned that a lot of these projects did not survived. My personal (unproven) theory is that the reason why those projects become orphaned at some point in time is that they are not bound to some certain code to maintain but rather end up in bits of communication which finally do not lead to a certain result because every participant finally keeps on working on his own project without gaining much from the common discussion.
The difference of Debian Med is that there is a certain amount of maintained code which leads to a new "product" and becomes some use. Another difference is that it does not (strongly) depend from the cooperation of all those different upstream maintainers who might have strong focus on their own project and are not willing / able to spend their time in those meta projects. If its free we just take it (and might ask for help as any other user might do) and include it into Debian. In most cases upstream is happy about this and supports our attempt because we are adding a measurable extra value to the project.
The big advantage we approached with the strategy to stay inside Debian is that we were able to increase the "run-over-by-bus-factor". Just plugging into a distribution which simply survives ensures that our meta project will survive even if some people might go.
Kind regards
Andreas.