OSUOSL News

Hardware Donation Expands OSUOSL Infrastructure

5/22/09

HP dl580s The Oregon State University Open Source Lab recently received a large gift in-kind donation from a local Portland company which included approximately 20 servers, two NetApp filers with approximately 14TB of disk space, load balancers, and more. This is a very generous donation which will help the OSL replace aging hardware and expand our current infrastructure to support even more services and open source projects.

One of the donated servers (pictured here), an HP dl580 with 20GB of RAM and dual dual-core Xeon processors has already been put to use as a community database server. The OSL is currently running five such servers which run MySQL and PostgreSQL databases for our hosted partners. Our database servers power such community sites as phpBB, Mozillazine, Linux Plumbers Conference, OpenOffice Extensions, BusyBox, Gentoo Forums, Kerneltrap, OLPC Support Forums, and many more!

We're excited and very gracious for the hardware donation, and we already have many plans for the new hardware! Can you help the OSL by making a monetary or in-kind contribution? See http://osuosl.org/donate for more information.

Flourish! Open Source Conference

5/06/09

Last month, Oregon State University Open Source Lab Operations Manager, Jeff Sheltren, headed to Chicago for Flourish! Open Source Conference, put on by the University of Illinois, Chicago. There was a great crowd at Flourish with a number of excellent speakers and demonstration/learning sessions going on throughout the two day conference.

Jeff spoke about the OSUOSL including the history, current projects, and some of the cool open source projects hosted at the lab. There was a lot of interest in the audience about forming open source groups at other universities and potential collaboration with the OSUOSL. At right, you can see Jeff speaking with members of the audience after his talk. Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/9202804@N06/3409624367/ used with permission.

Flourish plans to make video of Jeff's talk (and all of the other speakers!) available on their website in the near future. In the meantime, you can find Jeff's presentation on the OSUOSL here (odp format; pdf format). The presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

OSUOSL Visit to Japan

4/16/09

Deb and Matz Deb Bryant, the OSU Open Source Lab's Public Sector Communities Manager, was recently invited to participate in a number of events in and around Matsue City, located in the Shimane Prefecture of Japan. The region has drawn national recognition for the Matsue "Ruby City" project, a highly innovative initiative to promote open source software through a collaborative partnership created by local industry, academia, and government.

While in Japan, Deb participated in a number of events to help share what the state of Oregon, industry, government, and the OSL has learned through its years in supporting the growth of the Open Source Community. The visit included meetings with Shimane University's President Honda; Matsue's mayor; Shimane Prefecture's governor; keynoting at a seminar for industry and government; addressing the 37th Open Source Salon of the Open Source Software Society Shimane; spending time with colleagues from Japan's IPA Open Source Lab (their national referendum on OSS); National Applied Communication Labs and Mr. Inoue and Matz.

Many thanks especially go to Mr. Doi from the City of Matuse, to Mr. Noda of Shimane University, and especially to Mr. Tansho Deb's host and translator - and of course to Shimane University which sponsored the visit.

Above you can find a picture of Deb Bryant with Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"), the chief designer of the Ruby programming language. Nice OSL shirt, Matz! More pictures are available on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/58459279@N00/sets/72157615202768027/

Linux.com finds new home at OSUOSL

3/03/09

Linux.com is now being run by the Linux Foundation and, along with most of the other Linux Foundation infrastructure, is hosted at the OSU Open Source Lab.

The site has historically been a source for articles, information, and online forums about the Linux operating system. Under the Linux Foundation, the site will undergo a face lift in the coming months. An IdeaForge site has been launched at http://ideaforge.linux.com/ where you can view and make suggestions about what you would like to see on the future Linux.com site.

OSUOSL Announces new Sponsorship Programs

3/03/09

Today, the Oregon State University Open Source Lab has announced two new sponsorship programs: the OSL Alliance and Friends of the OSL.

The full press release is available here.

For questions regarding donations to the lab, please contact donations@osuosl.org

# open source lab