A new blog post from the OSL explains, “Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While the Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable.”
The Open Source Lab has operated for 22 years as hosting infrastructure for variousopen software projects, in partnership with Oregon State University’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It provided mirroring and hosting projects for Mozilla, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux kernel for many years, and currently runs infrastructure for “over 500 free and open source projects from all over the world.”
The groupcurrently runs some infrastructurefor Alpine Linux, BusyBox, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Deluge, FFmpeg, postmarketOS, Inkscape, Firefox, GNOME, MacPorts, Haiku, LineageOS, Gentoo, Tor, QEMU, and hundreds of other software projects. If you’ve ever downloaded a Linux distribution or open-source application, there’s a chance that it was compiled or downloaded from an OSL server. In addition to helping the larger open-source software community, the group employs Oregon State undergraduate students with paid engineering internships. Everyone wins: students get a job, and you get to download your favorite Linux distribution for free.
Many software projects have put out calls for OSL donations. An account for Rocky Linuxsaid, “The beacons are lit, @osuosl calls for aid. […] Among countless other open source projects, OSL supports Rocky Linux by hosting our ppc64le and s390x build environments. The page for postmarketOSsaid, “[OSU] has been around for 22 years. They kindly host our gitlab for 6 months now, and provide important services for more than 150 other free and open source software communities. We usually don’t ask this, but please boost for reach, this is important infrastructure for so many FLOSS projects!” The Inkscape project alsosaid, “We at #Inkscape rely on them for hosting our website, mailing lists, mail servers, and DNS. Please consider donating to them so they can keep their services running for all of us!”
