Ok,

Warning: HIPA laws cover patient rights you attempt to access patient files that you are restricted from will give you 25 years for every line of information read... So one patient file you read will give you life in prison....

Looked this over first off I worked as in IT department in Hospital....

1. This looks to be code written in opensource for bio-infromation coming from machine code to readable human text...

2. Furthermore since patients are covered under HIPA laws... There is no way your going to be able to view patient files....

3. Most of the code seems to be related to database information. To how the hospital handles the data and references the data....

4. Most of the equipment after lets say 5 to 10 years becomes unsupported and warranty runs out... Lots of these machines run old interfaces outdated and sometimes crash. Usually a hospital hires an outside source to deal with hospital equipment or the hospital buys an extended warranty and the company hires a consultant to handle software problems.

Most issues will be that equipment is:

a) Crashed the software code
b) interface problem
c) New Microsoft windows, Unix computer, upgraded software version
d) virus has gotten down to machine level

Why opensource machine code....????

Well simple unless you own a Compaq computer running windows 98 se and have lets say 2 million dallor baby monitoring machine there is no real need for you to have access to that machine code, but the hospital organization may have 25 machines like that across the US and may need to have access to that program so they make it opensource and ship the code via CD/DVD as repository for a unix based system..


That is why it is open source so they don't have to keep paying programmers to come to the hospital network and rewrite the code for another system in there network....

That is the need for bioinformatics software repository......

Since that is Opensuse which is a Novell based network.... Opensuse Computer is probably running on a Novell server....

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F is a non profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics.

The Linux Google link http://www.google.com/linux

Keyword : .. bioinformatics software ..
http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&q=...re&btnG=Search

Examples :
http://nebc.nox.ac.uk/tools/bio-linu...age-repository
> > The Bio-Linux 5 bioinformatics software
is installed from a centralised repository ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioLinux
> > BioLinux is a term used in a variety of projects
involved in making access to bioinformatics software
on a Linux platform easier using one or more of the
following methods : ...
.....