I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab. Over the past
several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While the Oregon State
College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current
funding model no longer sustainable. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable and CoE needs to
find ways to cut programs.
Earlier this week, I was informed that unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will be forced to shut
down later this year. 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.
For transparency, the $250,000 is broken down into the following roughly:
- Staff pay $150k (60%) (1 s
15 Comments
EMH333
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
jawilson2
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?
dlachausse
Oregon State University has a $1.651 billion endowment according to Wikipedia…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_univers…
Would that be an option to save it if corporate sponsorship doesn’t work out?
aseipp
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've always thought very highly of the Open Source Lab. I hope someone can help them make it through this.
floren
I hear Microsoft loves open source, so they should be able to step up and cover this, right?
devwastaken
open source only works when youre more than financially and location stable.
corporate fascism has artificially raised prices across the board and ensured that the next gen must work far more for less.
they work with gov to increase taxes, licensing and insurance on the individual while reducing for the corp.
higher education is yet another corrupt corp. theyre not there to help you, but are the introduction to this system.
kev009
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'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.
It'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.
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.
mitchellh
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't think we ever formalized anything.
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.
I personally think corporate sponsors shouldn't blink twice at supporting OSU OSL, but I'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.
Well, I'll help. I've emailed to setup a donation.
Thanks for everything you've done Lance, OSUOSL. And thanks to anyone else who helps support them!
rdtsc
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.
Maybe some unicorn billionaires could spare a few millions? Especially the ones who built their wealth on top of open source libraries or databases.
mburns
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.
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 /some/ experience. The OSL provides that, and supports countless FOSS projects in the process. It’s really a great arrangement.
Obviously I’m biased, but the Open Source Lab should be viewed as one of the Crown Jewels of OSU.
ecnahc515
I worked at the OSL as a student years ago, and it was one of the most impactful places I've ever worked at. I learned a lot, and I wouldn't be the engineer I am today without having worked there.
Since graduating, I've also hired, and worked with multiple alumni from the OSL and they're always top notch. Anyone looking for interns or new graduates with devops/SRE or SWE experience should be looking at the OSL for talent. It's not too often you can hire a new graduate with potentially multiple years of production experience, especially in devops.
In context of HN/Y Combinator, https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/coreos was a successful container/Kubernetes focused startup founded by two OSUOSL alumni, Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips, which was eventually acquired by Red Hat.
The OSL is something special.
For a list of projects the OSL helps host, check out https://osuosl.org/communities/. 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/builds on.
mulderc
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.
mulderc
Link to donation page: https://osuosl.org/donate/
sregister
Jensen is an OSU alum–it would be nice if this reached him.
don-bright
They are part of gnu compile farm which donates compute to open source projects.
I used them a lot when I worked on OpenSCAD build system, there weren't a lot of places 12+ years ago you could go 'make -j 30' on a PowerPC or 'ctest' and have it run dozens of builds/tests in parallel. Really helped alot, that C++ template stuff would barely build at all on my personal machine.