2026-11-07 –, D0206 Language: English
Open source has won the infrastructure war. Linux runs the servers, containers orchestrate the workloads. But on the researcher's laptop and on the HPC node where there is no root access, critical scientific tools remain locked behind proprietary licenses that change without warning. In 2024, Anaconda Inc. started requiring commercial licenses from universities. QIAGEN shifted its genomics workbench to subscription pricing that longtime academic users could no longer afford. Bio-Linux, the go-to bioinformatics distribution, was discontinued in 2017 with no successor.
This talk introduces the Fedora Bioinformatics SIG, a new effort to package the compiled C/C++ tools that researchers cannot easily install on their own. I will present real cases of vendor dependence in science, what Fedora already ships (more than you think), and a concrete use case from Masaryk University right here in Brno. This is a work proposal, not a finished project. You do not need to know biology to help. Bioinformatics packaging is software packaging.
Priscila Gutierres is a Brazilian data engineer at Red Hat who lives in
Brno and keeps finding new ways to apply her background in math,
computer science, and computational mathematics. Her masters research
at the University of São Paulo combined augmented reality and machine
learning to help healthcare professionals with motor rehabilitation of
patients, and now she spends her days somewhere between data pipelines, coding, games, cats
and Fedora packaging.