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Inside the Open Source Lab

Posted by timothy on from the their-only-begotten-oc48s dept.

FreeFooOpenFighter writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. They currently provide hosting for an impressive list of projects including, among many others, the Mozilla Foundation, Debian GNU/Linux, and Gentoo Linux. According to the informative article, they plan to continue to donate hosting with their two OC48s to FOSS projects meeting their criteria."

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Being ontopic.. by casuist99 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's nice that the hosting is donated... does this give any advantages to Oregon State students? Ultra-fast downloads over the U's internal network connections, for example?

    Being closed to the public is probably going to happen with any "lab" at a university, but I'd bet that there are quite a few opportunities for student involvement with the lab if you know where to look.

  2. Re:sf.net by hacker · · Score: 3, Interesting
    "I agree to sticking with SF cause I got a huge problem with OpenSource being tied to schools."

    My only real beef in that regard, is that SF.net is not Open Source at all. Their code isn't Open Source, their formats are not Open Source, and they are wholly a 100% proprietary entity. They're just using the OSS community to get them visibility with corporate sponsors.

    One of my former colleagues used to work for them. When they released 1.0 of the proprietary SF.net codebase, all of the developers were immediately fired. It was like "Thanks for helping us reach this wonderful milestone. Now we can become profitable. You're all fired."

    You can't even download the last version of their OSS code and use it to run your own version of a version control hosting solution. If you wanted to migrate away from SF.net and export your projects, bugs, files, etc. you can't... because there's nothing else out there to import that data into. Its just like Microsoft documents... once you get your data in, you can't get it back out.

    That also doesn't take into account how many things they've crippled in the name of "security" there. Mailman (no mbox downloads, no search, no offline use of archives), cvs (no deletions, no branches), etc.

    Pitiful.

  3. Re:sf.net by hacker · · Score: 2, Interesting
    "We know what we've done for the Open Source community today -- what have you done?"

    I've only contributed patches, fixes, documentation and code to about 300 OSS projects over the last 10+ years. I only provide free, gratis hosting to OSS projects (using 100% Open Source tools, unlike SF.net). I only host dozens of mailing lists for OSS projects, gratis. I'm only the maintainer of about a dozen OSS projects myself.

    So you're right, not much at all.