Folding@Home Package

[Zachary Palmer <zep01@bahj.com>]

Hello, all.  It has been my understanding that the reason that the 
Folding@Home distributed computing software has not been made a Debian 
package is that the license under which it is released does not allow it 
to be free.  This software package has pretty much the best reason for 
being closed source that I've encountered; they want to prevent 
falsified results from damaging the research.

Of course, I understand that this means that we can't package up the 
Folding@Home binary.  But if I put together a Debian package that would 
use the preinst script to go fetch the software from Stanford in a way 
similar to how the flashplugin-nonfree package fetches Macrodobe Flash 
9, would there be any interest?  I'd really enjoy a quick, low-hassle 
way to fetch and install Folding@Home on my various computers as a 
service.  I see that there is a KDE applet, kfolding, that will handle 
Folding@Home, but it is dependent upon the existence of a KDE session 
(or at least a base KDE installation) and I'd like to install the 
software on my server as well as avoid messing with it if I somehow 
crash my GUI session.

So, in summary, is there anything I should know before I set out on this 
task?  And will people use it if I bother?

Thanks!

Zachary Palmer