VoxBo design philosophy

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VoxBo's design philosophy reduces to a set of beliefs about what's important in software design. These aren't really religious beliefs, they're considered beliefs about what's ultimately best for science. Without further ado, here's the list. Below we discuss why exactly we feel each is important, and how we're trying to achieve these goals in VoxBo.

Contents

Automation

Efficiency

Interoperability

Modularity

Multi-level interfaces

Freeness

This page has been tagged as needing a fair bit of work!

You might think that software costs for imaging labs would be pretty small compared to the cost of doing the actual imaging. But while there's some truth to this, software costs can easily get out of control. Consider the burden of periodic upgrades or maintenance fees. Consider the costs multiplied across all the machines in your lab (including machines it would be convenient to use for analysis but for which it's not worth the cost). Consider the number of packages you might want to license.

These costs are an obstacle to research.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has long advocated a sense of the word "free" that goes beyond "no monetary cost" to include four specific freedoms, summarized as freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, and modify the software.

Distributed processing

Support

Reporting

COTS-friendliness

Portability

Ease of installation

Ease of use

Generality/flexibility

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