NeuroFedora: Free Software for Free Neuroscience
Presenting author:
NeuroFedora is a community driven initiative to provide a ready to use Fedora Linux based Free/Open source Software (FOSS) platform for neuroscience. We believe that similar to Free software, science should be free for all to use, share, modify, and study. By making the tools used in the scientific process easier to use, NeuroFedora aims to help the neuroscience research community take another step towards this ideal.
The use of Free software in science is necessary for reproducibility, data sharing, and collaboration in the research community. While more and more tools are being developed using modern FOSS driven methods to ensure free (as in freedom, and thus also free of cost) access to all, the complexity of these domain specific tools can make their use by the multi-disciplinary target audience---individuals hailing from different, sometimes non-computing, disciplines---difficult.
With help from its parent FOSS Fedora community, NeuroFedora volunteers collect, build, test, and package FOSS neuroscience software to make them available on Fedora Linux based installations. The NeuroFedora community currently maintains ~170 packages for neuroscience software tools, either installable directly using the default system package manager (dnf) on Fedora Linux installations, or via container images. Furthermore, for computational neuroscience, the NeuroFedora community also provides a ready-to-use and install Fedora Linux based Operating System where commonly used computational neuroscience tools are bundled with the well integrated and modern Gnome desktop environment and software suite. Users also continue to retain access to the thousands of software tools in the standard Fedora repositories. The Comp-NeuroFedora OS can be downloaded from https://labs.fedoraproject.org
With the computational neuroscience domain being provided for, the NeuroFedora community is now prepared to work on other domains in neuroscience, such as neuro-imaging and data-analysis. For this purpose, we invite members of the neuroscience community to join the initiative. No knowledge of software development is necessary---the community strongly focuses on knowledge exchange and “learning by doing” to ensure continuous community development.
Documentation on the NeuroFedora community, its processes and communication channels, and the software it maintains can be found here: https://neuro.fedoraproject.org
The use of Free software in science is necessary for reproducibility, data sharing, and collaboration in the research community. While more and more tools are being developed using modern FOSS driven methods to ensure free (as in freedom, and thus also free of cost) access to all, the complexity of these domain specific tools can make their use by the multi-disciplinary target audience---individuals hailing from different, sometimes non-computing, disciplines---difficult.
With help from its parent FOSS Fedora community, NeuroFedora volunteers collect, build, test, and package FOSS neuroscience software to make them available on Fedora Linux based installations. The NeuroFedora community currently maintains ~170 packages for neuroscience software tools, either installable directly using the default system package manager (dnf) on Fedora Linux installations, or via container images. Furthermore, for computational neuroscience, the NeuroFedora community also provides a ready-to-use and install Fedora Linux based Operating System where commonly used computational neuroscience tools are bundled with the well integrated and modern Gnome desktop environment and software suite. Users also continue to retain access to the thousands of software tools in the standard Fedora repositories. The Comp-NeuroFedora OS can be downloaded from https://labs.fedoraproject.org
With the computational neuroscience domain being provided for, the NeuroFedora community is now prepared to work on other domains in neuroscience, such as neuro-imaging and data-analysis. For this purpose, we invite members of the neuroscience community to join the initiative. No knowledge of software development is necessary---the community strongly focuses on knowledge exchange and “learning by doing” to ensure continuous community development.
Documentation on the NeuroFedora community, its processes and communication channels, and the software it maintains can be found here: https://neuro.fedoraproject.org