Future of OSU Open Source Lab in Jeopardy

I worked at the OSL as a student years ago, and it was one of the most impactful places I&#x27;ve ever worked at. I learned a lot, and I wouldn&#x27;t be the engineer I am today without having worked there.<p>Since graduating, I&#x27;ve also hired, and worked with multiple alumni from the OSL and they&#x27;re always top notch. Anyone looking for interns or new graduates with devops&#x2F;SRE or SWE experience should be looking at the OSL for talent. It&#x27;s not too often you can hire a new graduate with potentially multiple years of production experience, especially in devops.<p>In context of HN&#x2F;Y Combinator, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;coreos">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;coreos</a> was a successful container&#x2F;Kubernetes focused startup founded by two OSUOSL alumni, Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips, which was eventually acquired by Red Hat.<p>The OSL is something special.<p>For a list of projects the OSL helps host, check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osuosl.org&#x2F;communities&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osuosl.org&#x2F;communities&#x2F;</a>. You might see a project you care about in that list! As an example: they provide aarch64 and powerpc VMs for a ton of projects to do their CI&#x2F;builds on.

The OSL was transformative for my career as a budding CS student in Corvallis many years ago. I can’t say enough good things about the positive impact it has on the Open Source community and the students it employs.<p>In my experience, there isn’t a great on-ramp for learning to be a SysAdmin (or devop, etc) in a practical sense. Learning what it takes to support systems in “Production” with actual users, and all that entails, at some point requires a hands-on approach. Finding entry-level opportunities to do that isn’t easy until you have &#x2F;some&#x2F; experience. The OSL provides that, and supports countless FOSS projects in the process. It’s really a great arrangement.<p>Obviously I’m biased, but the Open Source Lab should be viewed as one of the Crown Jewels of OSU.

A lot of the fun parts of the computing industry have, predictably, been hollowed out by the rent seeking model of cloud and *aaS. There is some grace as it&#x27;s easier than ever to build some scalable web business.. but the most fun of my career was rabbit holing on computers for the sake of computers.. working on operating systems and device drivers and network stacks. And it did and still does matter to a lot of bottom lines, but corporates have a hard time connecting the dots or doing something other than what the flock is doing.<p>It&#x27;s a little awkward because the AI datacenter boon is a little bit of a revival for physical and systems work but it is limited to that and I am skeptical of the longevity.<p>Those days of having fun working on network stacks, operating systems, setting up FOSS development labs and being a good steward of things.. harder and harder to do and even harder to get started.

When I was working on GHC many years ago OSUOSL helped us by providing us access to some nice POWER7 machines (courtesy of an IBM kernel hacker who recommended and endorsed us) and we used them for years to solve weird issues. I&#x27;ve always thought very highly of the Open Source Lab. I hope someone can help them make it through this.

The Open Source Lab was a fundamental part of my college experience. I would not be the person I am now if not for the experience gained while employed there. It was such a great feeling to help hundreds of open source projects maintain infrastructure and services, especially some of the larger projects which have colocated hosts

A gap like cannot be closed without corporate and foundation gifts. That said, individual gifts can also contribute to the progress.<p>As is common with schools, parks districts, etc., the Open Source Lab partners with a 501(c)(3) organization, the Oregon State University Foundation, to accept tax-deductible donations.<p>For anyone who would like to directly support the Open Source Lab in staying open, please be sure to indicate &quot;Open Source Lab Fund&quot; on the Oregon State Foundation donation page [0]. Note that their form is *not* set up with any tracking to attribute your gift from your clickthrough, and that any general donations to the Foundation will likely *not* support the Lab in this effort to stay open.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;give.fororegonstate.org&#x2F;PL1Uv3Fkug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;give.fororegonstate.org&#x2F;PL1Uv3Fkug</a>, or click through from the general donation page.

I was with Mozilla when OSU&#x27;s OSL was supporting the mirroring&#x2F;serving of Firefox and Thunderbird globally. They were a key mirror&#x2F;supporter during the early days of Mozilla and definitely contributed to the growth of Firefox.

Jensen is an OSU alum--it would be nice if this reached him.

OSUOSL and Lance specifically (the writer of this post) was extremely supportive of me during the early days of Vagrant and Packer. Lance tried many times to try to find a way for OSUOSL to help my projects but I don&#x27;t think we ever formalized anything.<p>Regardless, they were always big users and big proponents of the OSS work I was doing. And I remember that. I think more than the OSS project support they do, the support and education they help provide for students is laudable.<p>I personally think corporate sponsors shouldn&#x27;t blink twice at supporting OSU OSL, but I&#x27;m not surprised given the state of... things. And the individuals choosing to judge and criticize based only on a 4 bullet point budget are infuriating.<p>Well, I&#x27;ll help. I&#x27;ve emailed to setup a donation.<p>Thanks for everything you&#x27;ve done Lance, OSUOSL. And thanks to anyone else who helps support them!

They are part of gnu compile farm which donates compute to open source projects.<p>I used them a lot when I worked on OpenSCAD build system, there weren&#x27;t a lot of places 12+ years ago you could go &#x27;make -j 30&#x27; on a PowerPC or &#x27;ctest&#x27; and have it run dozens of builds&#x2F;tests in parallel. Really helped alot, that C++ template stuff would barely build at all on my personal machine.<p>Sorry to hear this

I feel like that shouldn’t be impossible to raise. I would be more than happy to donate $250, now we just need 999 more to do the same.

&quot;I have reached out to our largest corporate sponsor and they are working to increase their support as we update our contract, but that still may not be enough.&quot;<p>Why wouldn&#x27;t they name the sponsor? Seems like a great thing some company (presumably Google?[1]) is doing, but they don&#x27;t get the credit they deserve.<p>[1] &quot;Google sponsors the OSL through financial grants.&quot; (Noting that none of the other sponsors seem to provide financial grants) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osuosl.org&#x2F;sponsors&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osuosl.org&#x2F;sponsors&#x2F;</a>

I help to run the OpenStreetMap infrastructure, and for many years the OSUOSL has generously hosted some of our servers.<p>Without OSUOSL OpenStreetMap would be more difficult to host and significantly slower to access from North America.<p>I hope OSUOSL can get the financial support they rightfully deserve.

I didn&#x27;t work at OSL directly, but I did work for the sibling organization (then called BSG, now called CAAS) and it&#x27;s sad to see this. I donated and would encourage other reads to do so too.<p>OSL and the sibling organizations at OSU are such an incredible program for students, and OSL in particular has had an outsized impact on the OSS ecosystem relative to its size and cost.<p>Moreover, it&#x27;s institutions like this which represent some of the best of the software world, and we can&#x27;t let them fall by the wayside as the capitalistic focus of larger companies just gobbles everything up with little regard for what they destroy.

OSU OSL provides CI machines for some of the more exotic architectures like Linux on Z and POWER to some ASF projects. It would a loss to close it down.<p>Maybe some unicorn billionaires could spare a few millions? Especially the ones who built their wealth on top of open source libraries or databases.

I find it odd that they can provide all the infrastructure compute &#x2F; storage &#x2F; bandwidth for all of these projects for $35K<p>Debian and Fedora on their own must be highly demanding??<p>Form the article: &quot;&quot;&quot; Currently provides infrastructure hosting for projects such as Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot&#x2F;Busybox, Inkscape, Cinc and many more! &quot;&quot;&quot;

Link to donation page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osuosl.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osuosl.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>

Am I reading correctly that of the $250K they need, $150K of that goes to a single staff member for 60% of their time? Does that seem...excessive?

Learned about the OSL way back in Brazil via their support to Open Source and some of their alumni who worked in OSS projects too. I hope they figure out a way forward. And I was surprised to see they ask funding for a single position. Always imagined they would be a team of 3-7 engineers.

I am not working in the computer science field any more, but my experience working with computer systems in an environment like this helped me gain a lot of confidence as an individual. This is amazing work and deserves to be funded!

The donation page is not easy to use and one must search the drop down menu for the tag &quot;Open Source Lab Fund&quot;. However it is worth the effort. I did my part.

&gt; While the Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, <i>recent changes in university funding</i> makes our current funding model no longer sustainable.<p>I suspect this is related to the recent Trump administration actions to withhold funding from colleges and universities. OSU already voted to increase tuition recently amid concerns about future federal funding [0]:<p>&gt; “New federal priorities and proposed funding cuts, especially for research, may have direct, negative consequences for OSU,” [OSU President Jayathi Murthy] said.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;iGX5X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;iGX5X</a>

OOT, How&#x27;d you distinguish between Oklahoma, Oregon and Ohio State University when you see the word OSU?

I want to go to Open Source University!

I hear Microsoft loves open source, so they should be able to step up and cover this, right?

Oregon State University has a $1.651 billion endowment according to Wikipedia…<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_colleges_and_univers...</a><p>Would that be an option to save it if corporate sponsorship doesn’t work out?