periodic commit

Author: mcgratta

mcgrattan/document/document.mdk

@@ -19,7 +19,11 @@ The paper presents the day to day challenges of maintaining and developing compl
 
 The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) has been in the public domain for 16 years, and the zone fire model CFAST (Consolidated Fire and Smoke Transport) has been around, in one form or another, for nearly twice that long. While both are widely used and well regarded within the fire protection community, most end users do not fully appreciate the challenge of thier maintenance and upkeep. This is true of most of the free and very useful publicly available open source software that we have come to rely on. Indeed, I am composing this paper using a new document preparation software tool named Madoko that I just discovered yesterday. I had a similar experience 26 years ago when I wrote my doctoral thesis using TeX, even before LaTeX became popular outside the mathematics community.
 
-I must confess that I do not know much about the organizations or people who create the wonderful free software tools that I use everyday for both work and home life. I assume that there is usually some financial motivation, like selling advertising space or user data or a not-free "premium" version of the software. This isn't a new idea -- we've been watching and listening to "free" TV and radio programs for a century for the price of being subjected to advertisements. But this is not the case with FDS and CFAST. These software packages are the primary means of transferring basic research results in fire into practice. In fact, most of us developers are essentially applied mathematics and computer scientists, whether or not our college degrees actually state it. This presents two fundamental challenges. First, researchers have historically viewed archival journals as the primary means of communicating their findings. Second, end users often regard these models as black boxes that spit out results and require little in the way of understanding basic fire phenomena. These two challenges have forced the model developers to do far more than just numerically solve the ordinary and partial differential equations that describe basic fire behavior. The long term viability of software like FDS and CFAST will require a considerable change in attitude of both researchers and end users because it is becoming increasingly difficult for the model developers to play all three roles – researcher, software developer, end user. No doubt, we cannot avoid completely all three, but if the perception in the community that NIST or similar organization can do it all, then the effort will certainly fail.
+I must confess that I do not know much about the organizations or people who create the wonderful free software tools that I use everyday for both work and home life. I assume that there is usually some financial motivation, like selling advertising space or user data or a not-free "premium" version of the software. This isn't a new idea -- we've been watching and listening to "free" TV and radio programs for a century for the price of being subjected to advertisements. 
+
+But this is not the case with FDS and CFAST. Their development is an integral part of our fire research program at NIST and collaborating organizations. These computer models are the primary means of transferring basic research results in fire into practice. Most of the developers, past and present, are not fire protection engineers because software development requires a considerably different skill set. In fact, most developers are essentially applied mathematicians and computer scientists, whether or not our college degrees actually state it. Our job is to translate fundamental combustion research into differential equations whose solution is of value to practicing fire protection engineers. Thus, the model developers interface two very different communities -- basic combustion research and fire protection engineering. Traditionally, these two groups do not interact -- they have different degrees, work for different organizations, and attend different kinds of meetings and conferences. 
+
+This presents two fundamental challenges. First, researchers have historically viewed archival journals as the primary means of communicating their findings. Second, end users often regard these models as black boxes that spit out results and require little in the way of understanding basic fire phenomena. These two challenges have forced the model developers to do far more than just numerically solve the ordinary and partial differential equations that describe basic fire behavior. The long term viability of software like FDS and CFAST will require a considerable change in attitude of both researchers and end users because it is becoming increasingly difficult for the model developers to play all three roles -- researcher, software developer, end user. No doubt, we cannot avoid completely all three, but if the perception in the community that NIST or similar organization can do it all, then the effort will certainly fail.
 
 <!--% ------------------------------------------------------------------>
 # A Brief History of FDS