What is the Open Source Lab?
The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is the home of growing, high-impact open source communities. Its world-class hosting services enable the Linux operating system, Apache web server, the Drupal content management system and over 50 other leading open source software projects to collaborate with contributors and distribute software to millions of users globally. Through custom software development, vendor partnerships and industry events like the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), the Lab's staff and students encourage open source adoption in education, government, health care and other sectors.
 What is Open Source Software?
"Open source" means that the building blocks for a program are freely available to use, modify, and improve. This provides for rapid software development by contributors worldwide, and the resulting program is available for anyone to use, anywhere, free of charge.
For more information on open source software and the Open Source Lab, click here.
 Open Source is all about contributions.
Countless numbers of developers are all giving of their time and talents to code, document, test, design, and deliver software so that the end user may benefit from it. The Open Source Lab is here to contribute resources to the community, allowing developers to focus on what they do best rather than having to spend time worrying about system resources and hosting. To continue operating, we need your contributions as well.

Latest OSUOSL News

Google has given a $300,000 gift to the OSUOSL to support our hosting infrastructure and the development that we provide to open source projects. This is the third large gift from Google, bringing the cumulative total of their support of the OSUOSL to $750,000.

We are very appreciative of the support that Google has shown. This gift will help us continue to provide a much needed service to the open source community, which benefits OSU, Oregon, and the rest of the world by providing tools and products that anyone can use.

The full press release can be found at http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2008/Jul08/google.html

The OSUOSL is funded entirely by private donations by companies such as Google as well as individual donors. Please visit https://osuosl.org/contribute for information on how to contribute to the lab. You can also contact info@osuosl.org for more information.

The OSU Open Source Lab will be in the OSCON expo hall on Wednesday, July 23 and Thursday, July 24. Please stop by booth #401, near the entrance of the expo hall to meet with the students and staff from the OSL. In addition to learning about the projects we're working on, you can also take a virtual tour of our data center to check out all of the servers hosted here at the lab.

We'll also have some free swag to give away, as well as gifts in return for donations. Hope to see you there!

For more information on OSCON, see http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/

OSUOSL will be mentoring three students in this summer's GSoC. We are currently in the "community bonding" period, and we are eagerly awaiting May 26th when the coding will commence! Our students are all very promising and we hope for this to be a very successful summer.

This year's projects include:

FOSSology -- Kurt Maier will be working to create code dependency analysis for the FOSSology project. This will be an agent which scans through source code and autoconf files for a given package and report back the code dependancies found within.

Helix Producer -- Arup Chakraborty will be developing a G.729 codec for Helix Producer.

Unify -- Luis Francisco Araujo Camarillo will be working on Unify helping to create a framework for creating software packages for multiple Linux distributions as well as for Solaris.