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Inside the Open Source Lab
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."
here are four (4) words that are never said enough to all the people involved in FOSS, they are free and no licence is required to say them:
Thank You Very Much
best wishes
The Rest Of the World(TM)
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.
Sourceforge couldn't even begin to handle a project as big as, say, the main Gentoo CVS tree. Gentoo alone has more hardware at OSL than all of sourceforge put together.
Where in the world did you get this idea? They just hired another student infact to help out with infrastructure related needs. What is so closed about it? They even had an http://osuosl.org/news_folder/open_house open house not too long ago. Apparently you didn't make it to find out. Also, Scott/Corey/Jason are all well rounded intelligent people have do an excellent job. Kudos on them getting this going!
I don't know where you got this idea from. I think the problem is that people who haven't heard much about the OSL just can't quite figgure what the OSL is here to do. There are two main goals, contract work for developing open source software (OSU's Maintain for exampe) and hosting for large projects (Gentoo Linux for example). If you are looking for a group to teach people about Linux, check out the OSLUG http://lug.oregonstate.edu/ if you have not already which is a student driven organization and is very open to the public.
Actually, the OSL is not a running joke around OSU. We're a fantastic team that is helping moving open source forward at the University and in the world.
Talk with our students, talk with all of our customers, talk with Mozilla, Gentoo, Debian, KernelTrap and ask them how much we suck. Lemme know how that goes for you.
The running joke is anonymous cowards that don't have the backbone to stick behind what they say.
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.
re: "They're just using the OSS community to get them visibility with corporate sponsors" - not so. When SF.net was launched no one knew how successful it would turn out. First and foremost the objective of SF.net is to do the best it can for the community. Yes money is needed to keep the site running (as Patrick says in his post, SF.net has *lots* of hardware, and consumes much bandwidth).
.com crash.
We know what we've done for the Open Source community today -- what have you done?
The developers that were laid off were not fired for completing 1.0 of SF.net as you imply. They were laid off along with many others when VA Linux got out of the hardware business. It had zero to do with SF.net, and all to do with the
Please - just the facts....
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
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.