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.

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.

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.

IBM, Google and Real Networks among lab’s industry donors Source: Jeff Sheltren, 541-713-3206 Media contact: Todd Simmons, 541-737-4611 CORVALLIS, Ore. - The Oregon State University Open Source Lab, home to growing open source communities, today announced the OSL Alliance™ corporate sponsorship program. The OSL Alliance enables commercial vendors to financially support the expansion of computing infrastructure and services that OSL provides to open source projects worldwide. Among its donors, Google and Real Networks have contributed $1.25 million to date.

Submitted by OSUOSL Admin on February 5, 2009 When Drupal began to outgrow its infrastructure in the summer of 2005, its developers appealed to the open source community for help. OSL offered to host the equipment, and students Eric Searcy and Narayan Newton were put on the case. “We attacked the problem from two different angles,” says Newton, who now works with Tag1 Consulting and is a member of the association that runs Drupal. Searcy, now a systems administrator at InsightsNow in Corvallis, dealt with the scaling of the Web side of Drupal while Newton worked with the database.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Gentoo was integral to the Open Source Lab’s foundation. The Linux-based operating system was one of the OSL’s first projects - it even preceded the existence of the lab - and was instrumental in building the buzz that put open source at OSU on the map. It started when Gentoo reached out to the open source community for help - it needed more infrastructure, and OSU provided it. “Web services donated an old Dell server, and from there Gentoo just grew and grew,” says Lance Albertson, lead Unix systems administrator at the OSL.

OpenMRS is an open source electronic medical record system framework. Led by the Regenstrief Institute and Partners In Health, OpenMRS has been implemented in several countries including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tanzania. The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is providing hosting for the OpenMRS Development Website including a Trac instance at http://dev.openmrs.org and the OpenMRS subversion repository. We are happy to provide services to OpenMRS and support their efforts in bringing usable medical information systems to developing countries where HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis are a major problem.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab was recently featured in a Network World online story about really cool university computer network labs. This is a great honor for us, and we are glad to be in such good company. Some of the highlights of the OSUOSL included in the list were our hosting of projects such as the Linux Kernel, Drupal, the Linux Foundation, our development work on the Oregon Virtual School District, and our annual Government Open Source Conference.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is proud to be the new home for two very important OSS projects. We are now hosting the main web sites, ticket trackers, code repositories, and mailing lists for RPM and yum. RPM is the package management system used by many Linux distributions including RedHat Enterprise, Fedora, SUSE, CentOS, Mandriva, and many others. The RPM format is also part of the Linux Standards Base.

As the Open Source Lab celebrates a decade of open source hosting, development and education, the lab is reflecting on its past accomplishments. Below is a favorite from our archives. OSL Teams with TDS for Bandwidth Increase Originally published on March 06, 2006 The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University has received a large donation of Internet bandwidth from TDS Telecom that will allow it to more than double the number of visitors it can serve, in the future helping up to 50 million people a day review or download free software.