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.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is very proud to announce the creation of our Advisory Council. The advisors will help the lab with its overall strategy, service development and outreach to industry partners. We are very excited to have the participation of many leaders from open source projects around the globe.

For more information on the advisors, including bios for each, please visit the OSUOSL Advisory Council page.

The full press release is available as well.

The OSUOSL has been working closely with many health-related open source projects during the past year. This effort will be highlighted in our annual Government Open Source Conference, GOSCON, with a Public Health IT track. One of the sessions will highlight TriSano, a project developed as a collaboration between Collaborative Software Initiative and the State of Utah, along with development provided by students at the OSL.

Please read on for the full press release, or visit http://goscon.org for more information.

GOSCON 2008 8/05/08

This fall OSL will hold the first Annual International Open ICT (information and communications technology) Summit, a full-day event convening information technology executives from government agencies around the world. It's being held in conjunction with OSL's fourth annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) on October 20-23, 2008, in Portland, Oregon USA.

In a recent press release, GOSCON announced its new international advisory council. Dr. Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Chief Technology Officer, ICT Agency of Sri Lanka and founding GOSCON advisory council member stated, “The expansion of GOSCON to include an International Open ICT Summit is a timely and highly welcome step in an effort to harness practical knowledge, experiences, and best practices of eGovernment initiatives that have leveraged open ICTs.”

The GOSCON 2008 Advisory Council provides critical guidance in the formation of the Summit. The GOSCON 2008 Advisory Council includes:
Ron Fresquez, Founder and CEO, The Open Source Technology Alliance (TOSTA)
Samia Melhem, Senior Operations Officer, CITPO, GICT, World Bank
Dr. Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Chief Technology Officer, ICT Agency of Sri Lanka
Timothy Ney, Co-founder, Linux Greenhouse

Google has given a $300,000 gift to the OSUOSL to support our hosting infrastructure and the development that we provide to open source projects. This is the third large gift from Google, bringing the cumulative total of their support of the OSUOSL to $750,000.

We are very appreciative of the support that Google has shown. This gift will help us continue to provide a much needed service to the open source community, which benefits OSU, Oregon, and the rest of the world by providing tools and products that anyone can use.

The full press release can be found at http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2008/Jul08/google.html

The OSUOSL is funded entirely by private donations by companies such as Google as well as individual donors. Please visit https://osuosl.org/contribute for information on how to contribute to the lab. You can also contact info@osuosl.org for more information.

The OSU Open Source Lab will be in the OSCON expo hall on Wednesday, July 23 and Thursday, July 24. Please stop by booth #401, near the entrance of the expo hall to meet with the students and staff from the OSL. In addition to learning about the projects we're working on, you can also take a virtual tour of our data center to check out all of the servers hosted here at the lab.

We'll also have some free swag to give away, as well as gifts in return for donations. Hope to see you there!

For more information on OSCON, see http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/

OSUOSL will be mentoring three students in this summer's GSoC. We are currently in the "community bonding" period, and we are eagerly awaiting May 26th when the coding will commence! Our students are all very promising and we hope for this to be a very successful summer.

This year's projects include:

FOSSology -- Kurt Maier will be working to create code dependency analysis for the FOSSology project. This will be an agent which scans through source code and autoconf files for a given package and report back the code dependancies found within.

Helix Producer -- Arup Chakraborty will be developing a G.729 codec for Helix Producer.

Unify -- Luis Francisco Araujo Camarillo will be working on Unify helping to create a framework for creating software packages for multiple Linux distributions as well as for Solaris.

Google has announce that they will extend the Summer of Code application deadline to Monday, April 7, 2008.

Here's your chance to get paid $4,500 to work on open source software! Apply now at: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/