What is the Open Source Lab?
The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is the home of growing, high-impact open source communities. Its world-class hosting services enable the Linux operating system, Apache web server, the Drupal content management system and over 50 other leading open source software projects to collaborate with contributors and distribute software to millions of users globally. Through custom software development, vendor partnerships and industry events like the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), the Lab's staff and students encourage open source adoption in education, government, health care and other sectors.
 What is Open Source Software?
"Open source" means that the building blocks for a program are freely available to use, modify, and improve. This provides for rapid software development by contributors worldwide, and the resulting program is available for anyone to use, anywhere, free of charge.
For more information on open source software and the Open Source Lab, click here.
 Open Source is all about contributions.
Countless numbers of developers are all giving of their time and talents to code, document, test, design, and deliver software so that the end user may benefit from it. The Open Source Lab is here to contribute resources to the community, allowing developers to focus on what they do best rather than having to spend time worrying about system resources and hosting. To continue operating, we need your contributions as well.

Latest OSUOSL News

The OSUOSL was recently featured in a Network World online story about really cool university computer network labs. This is a great honor for us, and we are glad to be in such good company. Some of the highlights of the OSUOSL included in the list were our hosting of projects such as the Linux Kernel, Drupal, the Linux Foundation, our development work on the Oregon Virtual School District, and our annual Government Open Source Conference.

The Network World article is located at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/121508-university-networking-labs.html?page=4

For a full press release, please see http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2009/Jan09/opensourcelab.html

On October 22, 2008 government and private industry experts will debate the issues and opportunities presented by collaborative software development models at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) in Portland, Ore. The distinguished panelists have direct experience with successful public/private consortiums based on the open source software model in which developers as well as business and technical users collaborate to create new applications while sharing both the costs and the benefits.

"The advantages to moving to an open source model for government software would not just be lower costs and better knowledge sharing across the public sector; it might also take us closer to the level of access, transparency and flexibility that the public is starting to demand from its governments, said Brian Belhendorf, CollabNet founder and Mozilla board director. "Software development is at its core a collaborative process -- collaborative between developers, even those working on different projects, and collaborative between developers and users. The ‘big deal' about the Open Source model is that it recognizes this fact and makes it possible to move away from treating every project as an isolated endeavor. I look forward to being a part of this conversation."

The "Open Government Collaboratives" panel will be led by Oregon Department of Transportation Chief Information Officer Benjamin Berry and Newport News, Virginia IT Director Andy Stein. The duo brings years of experience in early adoption of open source software and models in government environments. Their goal is to draw the audience -- primarily state, local and national goverment IT management -- into the session and extract a reference model for additional communities on the spot.

GOSCON is organized by the OSL. The conference is part of its mission to education and support community.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is proud to be the new home for two very important OSS projects. We are now hosting the main web sites, ticket trackers, code repositories, and mailing lists for RPM and yum.

RPM is the package management system used by many Linux distributions including RedHat Enterprise, Fedora, SUSE, CentOS, Mandriva, and many others. The RPM format is also part of the Linux Standards Base.

Yum is a package installer/remover for RPM-based systems, and does all the work to calculate dependencies for packages that you want to install or remove. Yum is the default package manager for RedHat Enterprise, Fedora and CentOS Linux distributions. In addition to yum, the OSUOSL is also hosting development sites for yum-utils, a collection of utilities and scripts built around yum, and createrepo, the program which creates metadata used in package repositories (supported by yum, apt-rpm, red-carpet, smart, up2date, and yast).

The sites for RPM and yum can be found at http://rpm.org and http://yum.baseurl.org, respectively.