Subject: CCL:RE:Anybody agrees with me

From: Eugene Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 19:48:35 -0800 (PST)

[From coordinator: This message got stuck for 2 days, I am very sorry...]

Suzanne Sirois writes:

 > In my opinion there is two life sciences area of applications that 
 > currently need standards:
 > 1) GUI
 > 2) Methods
 > 
 > This sounds to me like classes in OOP.

I would like to use this opportunity to alert bioinformatics people
about the existance of http://bioperl.org/ and http://biopython.org/
which currently both undergo rapid development, and are likely to
become useful in near future, if not already.

The only way to push open standards realistically, whether in GUIs or
deep code internals, is Open Source.

There are a wealth of packages already available (a small selection of
what is actually out there) those without the trailing red $$$ at

      http://sal.kachinatech.com/Z/2/index.shtml 

though typically the interactivity/GUI concept of free code is
somewhat underdeveloped. However, this is nothing intrinsical, nothing
which can't be fixed with a bit of effort.

Here at CCL, both the developer and user communities are present,
sometimes within the same person. I think this is a unique opportunity
to get organized.

Don't expect the vendors do it for you, because both the concept of
OpenSource and the comparatively small user community (no economies of
scale) make OpenSource an attractive development option for commercial 
software developers.

Regards,

Eugene Leitl