February of 2004 saw the inception of the Open Source Lab. It was finally a reality after months of planning and working with University administration to make it happen. By working with people at OSU and in the open source community we have been able to create something truly unique in a very short period of time.

Building the Team

In the last year we have hired 3 new full-time people in addition to myself, our operations manager and the 5 part-time students working here in the lab. Our team is rock-solid, agressive and talented beyond our wildest expectations.

Hosting the Community

In the last 9 months we have done something that no other group has accomplished before; bringing together disparet open source groups under the same umbrella and created an atmosphere where they can all co-exist, grow and thrive.

Our goal has always been to create a center of gravity for hosting and collaboration among the community that has never been seen before. The economies of scale that we can realize here are tremendous and have instant impact on the FOSS community at large. In addition to economies of scale we realize, we are also helping to bring a level of consistency to open source projects that will hopefully help them flourish in the years to come.

New hosted partners for 2004 include cAos, Mozilla, ppclinux.org, BusyBox and a several of others. Gentoo has completed their migration of their entire build infrastructure to our facilities in addition to several other services they provide for their users.

We have added close to 3 full racks of equipment for providing services to our partners as well as new switching equipment and network paths for increased reliability and capacity.

Development

Our development shop has really come together in the last few months. Our infrastructure is in place and tied together now via a fantastic openLDAP deployment. Our source code repositories and services for developers are on-line and collaboration is well under way.

Projects such as Maintain and Ockham have kept us quite busy as well as our help bringing Nutch to campus and getting users involved with our Helpdesk product.

Our focus on product-based work has allowed us to realize some amazing cost savings for groups doing project-based work.

2005 : The Source of the Source

We are excited about our progress in 2004 and we know that next year will be even better. 2005 will see the OSL re-doubling its efforts to attract new projects for hosting here as well as driving cross-collaboration among projects. We want to facilitate growth of projects while maintaining the integrity of the communities that have come to depend on them.

On the development side, we see ourselves heading in the direction of "community source" projects such as Sakai and Kuali which could realize some tremendous cost savings for our University and others in the Northwest. We hope to act as the catalyst for more collaboration among like-minded institutions looking to save money and invest in development of open source solutions.

Look for new initiatives coming out of the OSL in 2005 such as the "boot camp" and a membership drive later in the year. In helping the community and providing for the projects that have given so much to open source we hope 2005 is the year of the OSL becoming the source of the Source.