As reported a few months ago, KDE software has plenty of use among scientists, who may use Plasma workspaces for their daily jobs or develop applications on top of the KDE Platform. We interviewed Thomas Friedrichsmeier, the lead developer of RKWard, a KDE Integrated Development Environment for the statistical programming language R.

"...It is time for scientists to reconnect their work and expertise with a wider role in society, to become Citizen Scientists [...] By doing science differently, these scientists and others like them are challenging assumptions about the why, the how and the what of twenty-first century science." — via Lionel Larqu

It worked for software, so why not science? The open source science movement has been gaining momentum, and it's shaping the future of scientific research and discovery.

"...Nearly 300 delegates, coming from 18 countries on 4 continents, shared on the place that sciences and technologies have on the “march of the world”, on their evolutions and on the necessity of the emergence, on an international scale, of a network-space, which could put in prospects the working of the scientific insti

With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged.

"...Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) gave the jury’s motivation: 'Bioclipse is breaking new ground by integrating different research areas in life science and making the tools available as Free Software for everyone. It is the jury’s expectation that the project will have major impact in the future of life science research and education.' ..."

"This text is the initial result of the 1st Science & Democracy World Forum which took place in Belém on 26-27 January 2009. It has been written and accepted by citizens of 18 countries from 4 continents.

"...Science, technology and social and economic interests are profoundly intertwined today, interacting and mutually influencing one another. Many movements that are struggling for changes now recognize that, unless these issues are taken up by many and various groups of citizens, it will not be possible to deal with the challenges of our times.

I try to use FOSS extensively for my scientific work. In fact, when possible, I use only FOSS tools. Among these there is the R programming language. It’s a Free implementation of the S-plus language, and it’s mainly aimed at statistics and mathematics. As the people who read my scientific posts know, I don’t like R much. But sometimes it’s the only alternative.