The Oregon State University Open Source Lab's talented development staff and student employees provide full software development services including requirements analysis, design, coding and testing. We are passionate about developing a robust solution that is well-designed, does what you want, and will hold up over time.

Development Projects

Our development solutions have served many open source projects as well as educational and government organizations who are looking to implement or extend open source software to meet their needs. Here are a few recent projects the OSL has worked on.

Oregon Virtual School District

The Oregon Virtual School District is a program led by the Oregon Department of Education that, in cooperation with a consortium of virtual learning providers throughout the state, seeks to increase access and availability of online learning and teaching resources free of charge to the people of Oregon. Oregon State University is providing hosting and development resources for the project.

For more information, please visit http://orvsd.org

Trisano

TriSano™ is an open source, citizen-focused surveillance and outbreak management system for infectious disease, environmental hazards, and bioterrorism attacks. It allows local, state and federal entities to track, control and ultimately prevent illness and death.

OSL students have done development on the Trisano project working closely with the project's development team.

One Laptop Per Child

OSL development staff have worked on multiple aspects of the OLPC and Sugar projects. Two of the larger projects the OSL has worked on in relation to the OLPC are the media player and printing support.

Collaboration and interaction are a huge focus for the OLPC project, and because the laptops are able to record video with their built in webcam there is a need for a media player. In partnership with Real, the Open Source Lab has taken on this project to fill this gap. The software to take care of this void is the media player activity for Sugar, the user environment for the OLPC project. The activity is a full-fledged media player, tailored specifically to fit within the human interface guidelines that the Sugar team has provided.

The media player is being created using the new python bindings for the helix dna client. It has been designed to provide the best media experience possible while maintaining a level of simplicity that children all around the world will be able to handle.

Thanks to a gift from HP, the OSL has been able to work on adding printing support to the laptops, thus enabling students to be able to retain physical copies of their assignments among other things.

Bouncer

Bouncer is a mirror management app that provides the tools to manage and monitor a mirror network with an easy to use admin interface. Bouncer has three main features:

• Sentry - fully customizable mirror inspection and reporting keeps administrators informed on network health
• A "bounce" script provides balance by distributing requests evenly across the network, and tracks useful statistics.
• An easy-to-use interface makes things clean and simple.

Bouncer is now driving all of the downloads for the Mozilla Foundation and OpenOffice.org.

Project Funding

The majority of our development projects are funded through donations we receive from both the OSL Alliance and the Friends of the OSL programs. In certain cases, we have an agreement in place and charge for our development services. This is especially true for educational institutions, state and local government agencies who may be looking for help developing open source software.