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Inside the Open Source Lab

Posted by timothy on Sat May 07, 2005 06:03 PM
from the their-only-begotten-oc48s dept.
Software The Internet GNU is Not Unix Linux
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."
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Inside the Open Source Lab 50 Comments More /

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  • On behalf of the Rest of the World (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2005, @06:11PM (#12464570)

    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)

  • SourceForge is open to the public, and kicks ass. What has this to offer that sf doesn't?

    • Re:sf.net (Score:5, Informative)

      by keesh (202812) on Saturday May 07 2005, @06:24PM (#12464656) Homepage
      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.

      • SF.net, until recently, ran on 1 server and 1 backup. Now I think they have 4 front-line servers and 2 backup (total of 6).

        I'm sure many OSS projects have more hardware than SF.net (in fact I know the projects I host at SourceFubar.Net do).

        There's a difference between "Doing It", and "Doing it Right". SF.net is a case of the former.

        • I agree to sticking with SF cause I got a huge problem with OpenSource being tied to schools. If you look at the credits for alot of the projects, the developers names should be the only thing on the list.

          I am almost offended when I see MIT, Stanford on a project list. It's not like a corporation that has a copyright lifespan. The school names never scrubs off, they last forever! When the developers are dead, the schools name is still associated with the code, project, credit....

          • Re:sf.net (Score:4, Interesting)

            by hacker (14635) <setuid@gmail.com> on Saturday May 07 2005, @11:56PM (#12466081)
            "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.

            • Re:sf.net (Score:3, Informative)

              by bangzilla (534214)
              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).

              The developers that were laid off were not fired for completing 1.0 of SF.net as you imply. They were laid off along

              • Re:sf.net (Score:3, Interesting)

                by hacker (14635)

                "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.

        • Until recently? I think you should check your facts. SF.NET runs on close to 80 servers. The site has never run on one server. I'm not aware of any OSS project that has more hardware then SF.NET. In fact SF.NET has one of the largest CVS repositories in the world....with many 100's of gigabytes in the tree. The site currently serves over 13,000,000 milllion a day. SF.NET would have no problem hosting Gentoo, but it decided to get out of hosting distros three years ago. (I ran the site
    • Whilst SF is an amazing site and do provide an impressive range of services, they do have their faults. The site is down surprisingly often and the mailing lists frequently suffer from huge delivery delays and message reordering.

      Don't get me wrong: what SF do is great and it's a non trivial task. But when we had sufficient resources, we moved over to our own systems where we had better control over such technical issues.
    • I love SF, except for its statistics system, which has been down for the majority of my project's life time. The new statistics system release has been delayed multiple time, kind like Longhorn.
    • SourceForge does not offer hosting for dedicated servers (including those coming from the communities themselves that need hosting). We take a real hands-on approach as well. For example, a new 2-way mobo and procs are being shipped for one of Gentoo's AMD64 development boxes this coming week. Someone from the OSL will be available to perform the upgrade when it arrives. It is more of a server hosting environment than a managed project hosting environment.

      SourceForge is great.. Most OSS apps out there
  • Like developing a new C library thats secure and fast.

    Or how about help developing a java operating system for high security. [sourceforge.net]

  • ...is there any way this works to the advantage of keeping fire under the rear ends of the Debian people to move forward at something other than their historical snails' pace?

    Also, do we need to have SF vs. OSL flaming? Either way, we have repositories for the OSS world to work with. Most of the stuff I use is over at SF for both Linux and Windows. However, if something is homed at OSL, that's cool too.
      • Seeing as all the regional google sites are still up, and gmail works fine for me, Id say its not a global problem. For interested parties -
        MacOne:~ richard$ host google.com
        google.com has address 216.239.37.99
        google.com has address 216.239.39.99
        google.com has address 216.239.57.99

    • Re:Being ontopic.. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by casuist99 (263701)
      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.

      • Re:Being ontopic.. (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by MoOsEb0y (2177)
        Downloads from OSL are the same speed as the rest of the Internet from the school. (100 mbit) The limiting factor is the server. Anyone with a decent host these days has 100mbit, so there's no huge advantage. Oh, and their Gentoo mirror sucks. I get about 40kb/sec off of it. I switched to datapipe.net.
        • You get 40kb/sec! That seems fairly fast to me. If I could download anything on the internet at 40kb/sec I would be happy. The fastest I seem to be able to get is 28kb/sec...
        • Sorry you're seeing slow download speeds. I actually think its a product of our success and part of our effort not to *just* focus on mirroring.

          As for alienating a large portion of campus, I have no idea how you got that idea. Showboating and self-important ranting? What exactly does open source showboating look like?

          I would say we help the academic environment by providing great opportunities for students.

          The OSL has actually brought in quite a bit of money to the University.
            • "What exactly does open source showboating look like?"

              It looks a lot like www.osuosl.org.

              (I'm going to take the karma hit because kveton doesn't deserve it.)

              Shut up. You're the perfect example of anti-open source showboating. Are you doing anything to help open source? Didn't think so. Show some respect for the OSL. Would you prefer that people stop hosting or mirroring projects because they don't have sufficient hosting?

              Do you even read your own BS, Mr. Anonymous Coward? Coward indeed.
            • I'm really sorry you're so frustrated with us. I bet 10 minutes with our staff and seeing what we have really accomplished would change your mind.

    • Re:Being ontopic.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by ramereth (752738) on Saturday May 07 2005, @06:34PM (#12464703)
      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 [osuosl.org] 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!

    • Re:Being ontopic.. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by marineam (882237)
      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/ [oregonstate.edu] if you have not already which is a student driven organization and is
        • Killed Maintain? Actually we've had several internal releases in the last few weeks. We've had several bug fixes in the last several months as well.

          The Bouncer [osuosl.org] is a pretty fantastic tool that we developed here completely in house. Mozilla likes its to the tune of 50 million downloads [spreadfirefox.com]. There are several other projects that we participate in as members, doing what our defined role is for OSU; helping OSU participate better in open source projects.

    • Re:The OSL is a joke (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kveton (158252) on Saturday May 07 2005, @09:16PM (#12465465) Homepage
      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.
    • You know not of what you speak. The OSL has brought in a tremendous amount of money to OSU in the short time they have existed. Not only have they produced unique solutions for folks on campus (and farther away), they have generated a great deal of interest in open source technology within the campus community.

      In addition to open source development activities, they are providing reliable hosting to some of the largest open source projects around.

      What about education, you say? The OSL is providing u

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