[dvlug] Higgs boson, found with the help of FOSS

[Grant Bowman]

Larry, thanks very much for this timely reminder.

For those familiar with the Fedora community and Scientific Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux , CERN's announcement of
essentially finding the Higgs Boson (what gives mass to all matter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson ) is not only a historic finding
in physics but a proud example of our efforts being put to good use. The
scientific method itself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_methodrequires transparency
and validation (full disclosure) which is impossible
in secrecy. Scientific communities all over the world using open source and
sharing their findings are leading adopters of the increasingly common use
of transparently developed and secure applications and operating systems on
servers, phones and desktops. CERN's announcement is the culmination of
decades of experiments and fulfills one of the primary reasons the Large
Hadron Collider at CERN was built. Finding the Higgs boson turns out to be
a tremendous counter example to the sometimes unscientific claims made by
proprietary software vendors.

Grant Bowman
Fedora Ambassador
 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Larry Cafiero" <larry.cafiero at gmail.com>
Date: Jul 4, 2012 10:27 AM
Subject: [Felton LUG] Higgs boson, found with the help of FOSS
To: "Felton LUG" <felton-lug at googlegroups.com>

Possibly off-topic, but I thought I'd pass on something I found out
while talking about the 'God particle' with a friend in Italy.

I understand from him that CERN has its own version of Linux called,
not-too-creatively, Cern Linux, which is based on Red Hat.

So it looks like much of the digital heavy lifting done on finding the
Higgs boson was done ultimately with the help of those contributors to
Fedora and Red Hat, whose contributions made their way into Cern
Linux. Not to take anything away from the physicists who made the
discovery, but giving special thanks to those who provided the tools.

When someone tell you how you need to have proprietary software to do
great things, you can point this out to them.

Thanks to those contributors to FOSS, and contributors to Fedora and
Red Hat, that made this discovery possible.

Larry Cafiero

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