  Sustainable software ecosystems are difficult to build, and require concerted
effort, community norms and collaborations. In science it is especially
important to establish communities in which faculty, staff, students and
open-source professionals work together and treat software as a first-class
product of scientific investigation-just as mathematics is treated in the
physical sciences. Kitware has a rich history of establishing collaborative
projects in the science, engineering and medical research fields, and continues
to work on improving that model as new technologies and approaches become
available. This approach closely follows and is enhanced by the movement
towards practicing open, reproducible research in the sciences where data,
source code, methodology and approach are all available so that complex
experiments can be independently reproduced and verified.
