Introduction Filippo Rusconi
Greetings DebianScientists,
this mail is to introduce me, from a personal perspective and also
from a Debian-related work perspective. Please, bear with me as I make
an account of how I became a Free Software user/advocate.
My academic work as a staff scientist in the french national research
council (CNRS) revolves around structural biology and in particular
analytical biochemistry. The main fields of endeavour are mass
spectrometry applied to biopolymers (mostly proteins) along with
chromatography and polymer chemistry. My background is thus nowhere
near computer science or informatics.
I've been doing my PhD thesis on protein post-translational
modification characterization, a while ago, and at that time large
molecule mass spectrometry was only blooming in the biochemistry
landscape. Hence the total absence of tools to either aid in the mass
spectra interpretation or aid in the preparation of the
biochemistry--mass spectrometry experiments. While doing my post-doc,
I decided to write such tool (at the time I still was using Windows NT
4). When Win2K was released, I wanted to use my own software on the
new OS... to no avail: MS introduced incompatibilities to ensure cash
flow. I decided that I was switching to GNU/Linux. I was hired at CNRS
that year : 1999.
Then came years of incredibly intense and exciting discoveries: first
RedHat (from 5 to 8, if I recall correctly) and then, in 2002, I
switched to Debian. I got hooked with the Free Software philosophy
very quickly, got involved in some non-scientific events, like going
from time to time to Brussels to try educate the MPs about the evil of
software patents (I met there Lionel Mamane), participated to Free
Software meetings (mostly science-orientated).
For a number of years I developped polyxmass (that later became GNU
polyxmass) as a GNU/Linux-based full rewrite of my initial
software. After I got that software published I received a number of
emails along the lines "This soft looks good, but unfortunately I am
not able to use it because it does not run on Windows".
This was an interesting problem : my ethics lead me to think GNU/Linux
(and not Windows or Mac), but at the same time the software was
designed to be run along with the mass spectrometer aquisition
software (as a decision making aid tool) and thus should have had the
capability to run on that OS. Coincidentally, the Windows licensing
model of the Qt libraries from at-the-time Trolltech had changed since
a little while, which prompted me to investigate their use to port
polyxmass. This work I did in the last two years and a half. A port
that produced massXpert [0] and of which a publication is in
preparation [1]. Free Software on GNU/Linux, MSWindows and
MacOSX... might be a good path to show biologists and chemists that
Free Software produces tools benefitting them [2].
Since my last packaging of GNU polyxmass, I have not dealt with Debian
packaging, until the latter work we did together with Lionel on massXpert. I
thus have re-learnt a number of tasks and certainly I feel more
confident with these.
I now would like to put massXpert under the Debian Science umbrella,
and take care of it as a part of the Debian Science team. Also, I will
gladly start doing work on other packages so as to progressively
deepen my understanding and widen my knowledge of the Debian distribution
as a whole.
Sorry for having been soooo long, but I felt like giving some
background to my engagement.
Sincerely,
Filippo
[0] http://www.massxpert.org
[1] I also sent an abstract for the Rencontres mondiales du logiciel
libre, Biological sciences session, at Nantes, France, in july.
[2] Download statistics for massXpert are encouraging: roughly 1.3
download a day, even far away from new releases. All my collaborators
use the new massXpert since roughly one year, now.
--
Filippo Rusconi, PhD - CNRS - public key C78F687C
Author of ``massXpert'' at http://www.massxpert.org
Reply to: