Google works with a Debian developer to make COVID-19 research easier on Linux
The COVID-19 pandemic has made life harder for pretty much everyone. People have lost jobs, businesses have closed, and worst of all, countless people have lost their lives. Thanks to the hard work of scientists, however, we finally have vaccines rolling out and normalcy is on the horizon.
Medical research surrounding COVID-19 isn't over though, as scientists still have plenty of work to do. Olek Wojnar, a developer of the Linux-based Debian operating system, has been working to help these scientists by packaging some software for easy installation on Linux. One of those packages was Google's build software Bazel. Upon finding out about Wojnar's efforts, Google offered to help with the process.
"The Bazel team jumped in to help Olek and the COVID-19 research community. Yun Peng, Software Engineer at Google with Olek Wojnar led the team of Bazel and Debian volunteers to move the project forward. The joint effort between Debian and Google has produced some great results, including packaging the Bazel bootstrap variant in 6 months time (Debian 11 -- released in Late 2021; Ubuntu 21.04 -- 22 April 2021)," explains Google.
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The search giant further says, "Bazel is now available as an easy to install package distributed on Debian and Ubuntu. The extended Google team continues to work with Debian towards the next step of packaging and distributing Tensorflow on Debian and other Linux distributions."
While Olek Wojnar deserves a lot of credit for this successful partnership, Google has obviously earned major kudos too. Not only has the search giant helped out in a big way in this instance, but it has long been a friend of both the open source and Linux communities.
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