For those that have spent any length of time in the open-source world have likely come across osuosl.org when downloading open-source projects that often are mirrored at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL). The OSU OSL over the past two decades has also provided VMs for various architectures from x86 and AArch64 to POWER for CI and testing purposes to open-source projects, among many other support roles. Unfortunately, the OSU OSL risks closure this year.
The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is under pressure as their funding model has been unsustainable after running at a deficit the past several years. Oregon State College of Engineering has been filling their funding gap the past several years but funding changes at the university no longer make it sustainable.
Thus without the OSU OSL raising $250k in committed funds per year, they are now risking closure as soon as later this year. They need a large corporate sponsor to pay their main staff member as well as several students. There is also around $35k in expenses as part of that for hardware, travel, subscription services, and more.
They only have around two weeks until the OSU OSL needs to provide an update to leadership on their path forward. Some of the self-reflecting OSU OSL milestones over the years include:
” – Provided hosting for Mozilla Firefox when they needed help in the early days and hosted the release of 1.0
– Was the home of the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Kernel.org, Mozilla for many years
– Offers fast and reliable software mirroring for projects
– Currently provides infrastructure hosting for projects such as Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot/Busybox, Inkscape, Cinc and many more!
– Virtual machines for x86, aarch64 and ppc64le are used by many projects for CI and other hosted services”
More details on this urgent funding situation via OSUOSL.org.
