Open Source Lab at Oregon State Faces Funding Crisis: Trump-Era Cuts to Blame?

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSL), a vital hub for free and open-source software (FOSS) development, is grappling with a severe funding shortfall, threatening its future after 22 years of service.

Lance Albertson, the head of the OSU OSL, has announced that the lab is facing a critical budget deficit, reportedly around $250,000, due to recent federal funding reductions impacting higher education across the United States.

The OSL has played a pivotal role in the open-source community, providing crucial infrastructure and support to numerous projects. Albertson highlighted some of the lab’s key contributions:

• Early Mozilla Support: Hosted Mozilla Firefox during its formative years, including the release of version 1.0.
• Home to Major Projects: Served as a home for the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, and Kernel.org for many years.
• Reliable Software Mirroring: Offers fast and dependable software mirroring services.
• Current Hosting: Currently provides infrastructure hosting for projects such as Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot/Busybox, Inkscape, and Cinc.
• Virtual Machine Support: Supplies virtual machines for x86, aarch64, and ppc64le architectures, used by many projects for continuous integration (CI) and other services.

Since its establishment in 2003, the OSU OSL has been instrumental in fostering the growth of FOSS projects. The lab famously provided early support to Gentoo and Drupal, and acted as one of the initial hosting sites for the Mozilla Foundation.

In 2012, the Drupal team reported that the OSU OSL was handling 10 TB of data per month for their project alone. At SCALE 17x, Albertson described the lab’s mission as “to be a neutral hosting facility and to foster relationships between FOSS projects and companies.”

The OSL currently supports 288 projects, with potentially more unlisted. The Gentoo project has already begun seeking donations to help the OSL weather the financial storm.

Comments on platforms like Hackernews underscore the lab’s significant impact. One user shared, “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 user recounted, “When I was working on GHC many years ago, OSUOSL helped us by providing us access to some nice POWER7 machines… 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.”

OSU President Jayathi Murthy acknowledged the impact of federal funding cuts, stating, “New federal priorities and proposed funding cuts, especially for research, may have direct, negative consequences for OSU,” as reported by the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

Given the OSL’s relatively modest funding gap of $250,000, some observers suggest that large tech companies, like Meta (formerly Facebook), which utilized the OSL’s test infrastructure in the past, could easily provide assistance.

Albertson acknowledged the inquiry, stating, “I have always loved The Register!” but declined to comment further, hinting at potential updates in mid-May. Stay tuned for further developments.

Keywords: Open Source Lab, Oregon State University, FOSS, Funding Cuts, Open Source, Software Development, OSU, Albertson, Drupal, Gentoo, Mozilla, Linux Foundation