The COVID-19 pandemic has made life harder for basically everybody. Individuals have lost jobs, businesses have shut, and to top it all off, innumerable individuals have lost their lives. Because of the difficult work of researchers, notwithstanding, we, at last, have vaccines carrying out and regularity is not too far off.
Medical research encompassing COVID-19 isn’t finished, however, as researchers actually have a lot of work to do. Olek Wojnar, a developer of the Linux-based Debian operating system, has been attempting to help these researchers by packaging some software for simple installation on Linux.
One of those packages was Google’s build software Bazel. After getting some answers concerning Wojnar’s efforts, Google offered to assist with the interaction.
“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),” clarifies Google.
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 clearly acquired significant praise as well. Not only has the search giant assisted amazingly in this case, yet it has for some time been a companion of both the open-source and Linux communities.
