Future of OSU Open Source Lab in Jeopardy
41 comments
·April 30, 2025ecnahc515
I worked at the OSL as a student years ago, and it was one of the most impactful places I've ever worked at. I learned a lot, and I wouldn't be the engineer I am today without having worked there.
Since graduating, I've also hired, and worked with multiple alumni from the OSL and they're always top notch. Anyone looking for interns or new graduates with devops/SRE or SWE experience should be looking at the OSL for talent. It's not too often you can hire a new graduate with potentially multiple years of production experience, especially in devops.
In context of HN/Y Combinator, https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/coreos was a successful container/Kubernetes focused startup founded by two OSUOSL alumni, Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips, which was eventually acquired by Red Hat.
The OSL is something special.
For a list of projects the OSL helps host, check out https://osuosl.org/communities/. You might see a project you care about in that list! As an example: they provide aarch64 and powerpc VMs for a ton of projects to do their CI/builds on.
mburns
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.
In my experience, there isn’t a great on-ramp for learning to be a SysAdmin (or devop, etc) in a practical sense. Learning what it takes to support systems in “Production” with actual users, and all that entails, at some point requires a hands-on approach. Finding entry-level opportunities to do that isn’t easy until you have /some/ experience. The OSL provides that, and supports countless FOSS projects in the process. It’s really a great arrangement.
Obviously I’m biased, but the Open Source Lab should be viewed as one of the Crown Jewels of OSU.
don-bright
They are part of gnu compile farm which donates compute to open source projects.
I used them a lot when I worked on OpenSCAD build system, there weren't a lot of places 12+ years ago you could go 'make -j 30' on a PowerPC or 'ctest' and have it run dozens of builds/tests in parallel. Really helped alot, that C++ template stuff would barely build at all on my personal machine.
Sorry to hear this
aseipp
When I was working on GHC many years ago OSUOSL helped us by providing us access to some nice POWER7 machines (courtesy of an IBM kernel hacker who recommended and endorsed us) 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.
xbar
I was always happily surprised to find that they were hosting what I needed when I needed it.
A great lab with a long history.
kev009
A lot of the fun parts of the computing industry have, predictably, been hollowed out by the rent seeking model of cloud and *aaS. There is some grace as it's easier than ever to build some scalable web business.. but the most fun of my career was rabbit holing on computers for the sake of computers.. working on operating systems and device drivers and network stacks. And it did and still does matter to a lot of bottom lines, but corporates have a hard time connecting the dots or doing something other than what the flock is doing.
It's a little awkward because the AI datacenter boon is a little bit of a revival for physical and systems work but it is limited to that and I am skeptical of the longevity.
Those days of having fun working on network stacks, operating systems, setting up FOSS development labs and being a good steward of things.. harder and harder to do and even harder to get started.
EMH333
The Open Source Lab was a fundamental part of my college experience. I would not be the person I am now if not for the experience gained while employed there. It was such a great feeling to help hundreds of open source projects maintain infrastructure and services, especially some of the larger projects which have colocated hosts
sregister
Jensen is an OSU alum--it would be nice if this reached him.
mulderc
I feel like that shouldn’t be impossible to raise. I would be more than happy to donate $250, now we just need 999 more to do the same.
jawilson2
Am I reading correctly that of the $250K they need, $150K of that goes to a single staff member for 60% of their time? Does that seem...excessive?
ecnahc515
That's 60% of the _budget_ not 60% of their time.
Also: Lance is almost certainly working more than 40 hours a week. Also, he isn't just a systems administrator. He's a mentor, fundraiser, any literally everything else that is needed to keep the lab running. There used to be more staff, but it's hard to retain qualified individuals. He's been there for 17 years, he's not doing it for the money, he does it because the OSL is important!
ecnahc515
Oh, and since he's a public employee, you can look up the current salary and history.
https://hr.oregonstate.edu/sites/hr.oregonstate.edu/files/er...
https://www.openthebooks.com/oregon-state-employees/?F_Name_...
I'll summarize it:
$107k in 2017 and $124k in 2023. I don't know about you, but someone with 17 years experience could easily be making 2-5x that depending on the company and role.
skyyler
No, you are not reading correctly.
The 60% number is the percentage of the budget, not the staff member's allocated time.
However, what do we know about the duties of this staff member? $150k isn't a very high salary for an experienced systems administrator
cycomanic
Presumably the $150k also includes all oncosts, so the actual salary is quite a bit lower still? As a side note I don't understand the arguments about salaries for nonprofits. Sure they should not be outrageously higher than the average, but shouldn't we want to get the best people for these jobs (instead of them working on aware?), or is the argument that if you work for a nonprofit you should be doing it out of altruism and be glad you receive a salary at all?
paleotrope
The argument that I assume you are talking about has some nuance around it. It's mostly about politically connected or nepotistic people who are pulling large salaries for essentially little to no work. I'm sure most regular employees at a nonprofit get treated as poorly as those of us at a normal business.
unquietwiki
I've been in the IT field for 20+ years, but I've never made that much in a year. What's stopping someone from saying, "Hire two cheaper guys, so there's redundancy?"
indrora
It's higher than an SDE in Seattle, but less than a senior position at those same companies, for people who want some perspective.
Firmly "Middle ground of the area"
j_walter
Cost of living in Corvallis <<< Cost of living in Seattle
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
nomansland
It is unclear from this request, but if this is the cost to the employer it is almost certainly a larger number than the actual pay which goes to the individual.
seattle_spring
$150k is not "higher than an SDE in Seattle", unless you meant to say "higher than the average salary for an entry-level junior SDE role in Seattle."
fuzzy_biscuit
Not if we're talking about an experienced engineer that is the only full-time staff for a year. That's the entire budget, so it feels pretty spot on. Maybe I'm out of touch or misunderstanding your point, though.
tikhonj
Assuming that's the "fully loaded" cost (ie including taxes, benefits, etc), seems like it would translate to a take-home salary of $100k or less.
rdtsc
OSU OSL provides CI machines for some of the more exotic architectures like Linux on Z and POWER to some ASF projects. It would a loss to close it down.
Maybe some unicorn billionaires could spare a few millions? Especially the ones who built their wealth on top of open source libraries or databases.
mulderc
Link to donation page: https://osuosl.org/donate/
A gap like cannot be closed without corporate and foundation gifts. That said, individual gifts can also contribute to the progress.
As is common with schools, parks districts, etc., the Open Source Lab partners with a 501(c)(3) organization, the Oregon State University Foundation, to accept tax-deductible donations.
For anyone who would like to directly support the Open Source Lab in staying open, please be sure to indicate "Open Source Lab Fund" on the Oregon State Foundation donation page [0]. Note that their form is *not* set up with any tracking to attribute your gift from your clickthrough, and that any general donations to the Foundation will likely *not* support the Lab in this effort to stay open.
[0] https://give.fororegonstate.org/PL1Uv3Fkug, or click through from the general donation page.