Oregon State University's Open Source Lab is running on fumes

Shakeup in US higher education funding means FOSS incubator is short a quarter of a million bucks

Higher education across the USA is facing federal funding cutbacks – and now the Oregon State University (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL) is in trouble.

The boss of the OSU OSL, Lance Albertson, reports a critical shortage of funding – putting the future of the 22-year-old project in jeopardy.

In the post, Albertson explained that OSL provides hosting for FOSS projects "from all over the world," listing "notable milestones over the years" as including:

• 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

Not to be confused with the University of Oregon, OSU set up its Open Source Lab in 2003. Since then, it's done a great deal to help multiple FOSS projects. As Linux.com reported in 2006, it gave critical help to Gentoo and Drupal, along with providing one of the first hosting sites for the fledgling Mozilla Foundation.

As the Drupal team reported, the OSU OSL was serving 10 TB of data per month for them – in 2012. Seven years later, LWN reported on a talk by Albertson at SCALE 17x, saying that "role of the lab is to be a neutral hosting facility and to foster relationships between FOSS projects and companies."

The OSL's site currently lists 288 projects it supports, though the page notes there may be more. The Gentoo project is already soliciting help for the OSL.

Over on the Hackernews message board, commenters were effusive about the org's impact, with one user stating: "The OSL was transformative for my career as a budding CS student in Corvallis many years ago. I can't say enough good things about the positive impact it has on the Open Source community and the students it employs."

Another commented: "When I was working on GHC many years ago, OSUOSL helped us by providing us access to some nice POWER7 machines (courtesy of an IBM kernel hacker who recommended and endorsed us) and we used them for years to solve weird issues. I've always thought very highly of the Open Source Lab. I hope someone can help them make it through this."

The Corvallis Gazette-Times, newspaper to the OSU hometown, recently reported on the impact of the Trump administration's funding cuts in its story, "OSU raises tuition amid federal funding concerns," and quoted from OSU President Jayathi Murthy's report to the university's board.

Murthy stated: "New federal priorities and proposed funding cuts, especially for research, may have direct, negative consequences for OSU."

Back in 2011, Facebook talked about its use of OSU OSL test infrastructure. The OSL reports that it is currently short $250,000, which we suspect Meta could readily find in pocket change. Whether it will is a different matter.

We've checked in with Albertson, who told us: "I have always loved The Register!" He declined to comment further, though indicated there may be more news from mid-May. ®