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OSU Open Source Lab

OSL Newsletter - April 2011

by Lance Albertson on Fri, Apr 29 2011
OSL in Prineville

The OSL Team and Our Host, David Recordon, at Facebook's Prineville Data Center

We've been spending the past few weeks making our plans for the summer: specing out longer term projects for our student employees, sharing our knowledge at conferences and continuing our mission to grow and support the world of open source. While we're busy looking forward and reviewing our progress thus far for 2011, we thought it would be the perfect time to bring the community an update on what we've been up to for the past few months since our last newsletter. If you'd like to receive more frequent news updates from the OSL, follow us on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

Thanks to Our Sponsors

Before we share our good news, we want to take a moment to express our sincerest thanks to our sponsors. Without the support of our generous donors, the OSL would not be able to provide support and services to our hosted communities. If you or your company would like to join our list of supporters, please visit our Donations information page.

It's always wonderful to see the successes of the OSL's alums, and we've seen many of our former student employees go on to great things: founding their own startups, opening boutique consulting shops and landing roles at high profile open source companies like Mozilla. We're particularly proud of one of the lab's first student employees, Alex Polvi, whose company Cloudkick was recently acquired by Rackspace. In true open source fashion, Alex has given back to the lab through his Silver sponsorship of the OSL and sharing his infectious enthusiasm for our plans to create open source boot camps at Oregon State University. Many thanks to Alex for his support and our best wishes for all his future endeavors.

Our friends at the CiviCRM project have once again joined us as Bronze sponsors for 2011. One of the best parts of our job at the OSL is providing support to the many open source projects that empower other organizations to do their good work, and CiviCRM does just that by providing constituent management software for advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. We are proud to host CiviCRM and send our thanks to them for their continued support.

Finally, a great big thank you to Google. Google has renewed their Platinum sponsorship in the lab for 2011, continuing their tradition of support for the lab since its inception. Google has donated more than one million dollars to the OSL and we are grateful for their generous support and the opportunity to participate in its open source programs for students, Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In.

Facebook, the OSL and Supercell

The entire OSL crew was recently invited to tour Facebook's Open Compute Data Center in Prineville, Oregon. Needless to say, it was an incredible experience for the team. You can read all about our adventure and see more photos from the data center on the OSL news page.

You may recall our recent announcement of the Supercell project, our new on demand virtualization and continuous integration resource, made possible by a generous grant from Facebook's Open Source Team. Our early testers are up and running on Supercell and our first report from the field has come in from the Drupal project. You can learn more about Drupal's use of Supercell on the blog of their stalwart Infrastructure Team member, Randy Fay.

Welcome to Developer's Paradise

Photo Credit: Nik Cubrilovic

Developer News

We released the 0.6 version of Ganeti Web Manager in early March. This latest release included several new features to support users of Supercell. You can read all about the latest release of GWM on the blog of our Lead Developer, Peter Krenesky.

Events and Conferences

We're looking forward to conference season going into full swing, and we're excited to let you know that OSL employees will be speaking at several upcoming events.

LinuxCon NA 2011

Our friends at The Linux Foundation have asked us to put together sessions on Linux and open source for university students at the upcoming LinuxCon North America Conference. Dubbed "Linux Learners Day," the track will feature sessions on Fundamentals of Open Source, Linux Basics and Embedded Systems. Keep your eye out for further announcements from the Linux Foundation for the full schedule and spread the word to any university students you think should join us! (And while you're at it, check out their two awesome design contests on right now to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Linux, either on video or emblazoned on cotton.)

Open Source Conferences in Portland

Portland is the town for open source conferences, and we're excited that our employees will be speaking at the two preeminent events in Portland this year. We hope to see you there!

Open Source Bridge: Tim Harder, Analyst Programmer at the OSL, will be speaking on OSWALD: Lessons from and for the Open Hardware Movement

OSCON: Lance Albertson, Lead Architect/Systems Administrator and Peter Krenesky, Lead Developer, will be presenting their tutorial Hands-on Virtualization with Ganeti. They will also be giving a talk on Ganeti Web Manager: Cluster Management Made Simple.

Southeast LinuxFest

Our Open Source Outreach Manager, Leslie Hawthorn, will return to South Carolina in June for Southeast LinuxFest. She will be speaking on one of her favorite topics, "Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software: Saving the World One Bit at a Time." Stay tuned to the SELF website for more details.

Past Speaking Engagements

You may recall our March post about all the upcoming speaking engagements and conference travel for our team. If you are interested in news from some of these events, here's a select sample from our travels:

You may also be interested in hearing more about our talks at the Palmetto Open Source Conference or our visit to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. And don't forget to check out the highlights from our bi-annual Beaver BarCamp!

Welcome to Our New Hosted Communities

We've had five new projects join the OSL since our last newsletter:

  • crosstool-ng, a software suite that helps build toolchains,
  • The Open Compute Project, a community site by Facebook to share innovations data center design,
  • Project Harmony, a community-centered group focused on contributor agreements for free and open source software,
  • Python Mentors, the community portal for the Python-Core mentorship project
  • QEMU, a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

Please join us in welcoming our latest hosted communities!

Student Interviews Series

We launched a series of interviews with the OSL's student employees in January 2011, and we've published four interviews thus far in the series. If you haven't had the opportunity to check them out, they're a wonderful way to learn more about every day life at the OSL and how our students are gaining real-world experience to prepare them for careers in industry. For your weekend reading pleasure, we present these interviews, penned by the lab's Student Writer, Anthony Casson:

  • Corbin Simpson, Developer
  • Mike Cooper, Systems Administrator
  • Rob McGuire-Dale, Developer
  • Trevor Bramwell, Developer

We've recently hired a new crop of students at the OSL, and we look forward to bringing you their stories in the coming months.

Sharing Stories

We're excited to share all this great news with the community, but we want to hear from you. What stories from the OSL would you like to hear? What's going on in our hosted communities that we ought to be communicating to the wider OSL community? Send your thoughts to us on Twitter, Facebook or by email to Leslie Hawthorn at leslie at osuosl dot org

OSL Newsletter

This newsletter contains updates of recent events at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. We will continue to publish newsletters every 3-6 months in the future. Newsletters will be posted to our website as well as sent out to an email list. If you'd like to receive newsletters via email, please sign up at http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/osl-newsletter