Episode: 1572
Title: HPR1572: An Open Source News Break from Opensource.com
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1572/hpr1572.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:11:35

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Hello hacker public radio, semiotic robotic here.
Here with another open source news break from opensource.com.
Of interest to open minded scientists might be our recent story about Fedora scientific.
A new Fedora spin targeted specifically at users whose work involves scientific and numerical
computing.
Project creator and maintainer Amit Saha tells us that the new distribution, quote, was
created out of a simple need.
The need to avoid constantly installing the same software on a fresh Linux installation.
To that end, Fedora scientific comes preloaded with tools scientists use most frequently,
like GNU Octave, IPython, GNUplot, Latex, and of course a Fortran compiler.
The distro features the KDE Plasma desktop.
In our health channel, Dr. Timothy King asks, can open science help patients and save
pharma?
Calling the current model of pharmaceutical development, quote, time-consuming, expensive,
and inefficient, King explains how open source thinking might spark new research innovations
more quickly, and with lower costs, all with no discernible decrease in research quality.
The outlines three new approaches to pharmaceutical research and interviews representatives of
both pharmaceutical companies and the FDA about the future of drug research, development,
and production.
And finally, we're featuring an article by Louis John McGibney, engineering application
software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who describes
the role open source technologies play in the organization's Earth Science initiatives.
Earth scientists, he writes, including remote sensing experts, climate modelers, practitioners,
policy makers, and decision makers have had a hand in furthering and monitoring the open
source space.
McGibney specifically explains how the climate modeling community uses OSI-approved licenses
to distribute and modify its tools, like the Apache Open Climate Workbench, a software
library that facilitates climate model evaluation.
It provides users with applications for data extraction, data manipulation, metrics computation,
and visualization.
You can learn more at climate.apache.org.
That's all for this news break from opensource.com.
These are just a few of the stories our community has been discussing this week.
Check out opensource.com for more, or follow us on Twitter at open source way for up to
the minute news.
This has been Semiotic Robotic, wishing you peace, love, and open source.
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