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Some data exist on the influence of leukapheresis volume on the number of harvested peripheral blood hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPC), but less is known about the influence on the composition of HPC. We therefore performed a prospective, randomized crossover trial to evaluate the effect of large-volume (LVL) vs. normal-volume leukapheresis (NVL) on subpopulations of CD34(+) cells in the harvest product of 15 patients with breast cancer and 8 patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Patients were randomly assigned to start either with an LVL on day 1 followed by an NVL on day 2 or vice versa. The number of HPC, the extraction efficiency defined as difference between yield in the harvest and decrease in peripheral blood, and the relative proportion as well as the absolute numbers of CD34(+) cells coexpressing CD38, CD90, HLA-DR, CD117, CD7, CD19, CD41, or CD33 were evaluated. There was no significant difference with regard to the percentages of the subsets on comparison of LVL to NVL procedures. Only the absolute median number of CD34(+)HLA-DR(-) cells was significantly (P=0.02) higher in LVL harvests compared with the corresponding NVL components, which can be explained on the basis of the higher yield and the higher extraction efficiency in LVL compared with NVL. LVL results in a higher yield of CD34(+) cells and leads to an intra-apheresis recruitment of HPC but the relative composition of the harvested CD34(+) cells is not changed significantly. In addition, the amount of early, HLA-DR(-), hematopoietic HPC seems to be increased by an LVL.

In the last years, free and open source software (also sometimes termed libre software) has gathered increasing interest, both from the business and academic worlds. As some projects in different application domains like most notably the operating system Linux together with the suite of GNU utilities, the office suites GNOME and KDE, Apache, sendmail, bind, and several programming languages have achieved huge success in their respective markets, both the adoption by commercial companies, and also the development of new business models by corporations both small and large like Netscape or IBM have increased. Given this situation, it did not take a long time for the discussion surrounding this new phenomenon to reach public organizations. Especially the most prominent example, the choice between a free operating system like GNU/Linux or a commercial system like Microsoft Windows has sparked interest in this new form of software, its legal and economic implications, and its new model of software development. In this article, these implications will be explored, explicitly not focusing solely on the Linux vs. Microsoft debate. To this end, an introduction to free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) and its concepts will be given, then different aspects of the relationship between FLOSS and public organizations, especially e-government, together with future trends will be discussed.

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