Open Source Musing by Jeff Sheltren of the OSU Open Source Lab

2009 has been an exciting and eventful year at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL). This year marks our sixth anniversary of providing open source projects with world-class hosting and development services. I'd like to take this chance to look back on what we've done at the OSUOSL this year, and what we expect from next year.

Our hosting services have continued to expand this year. We brought a number of new projects into our data center this year, including:

• Cacti -- Cacti is a complete network graphing solution. The OSUOSL is hosting a server used to provide backup web hosting, DNS, email and other services for the project.
• CentOS -- CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. The OSUOSL is hosting two dedicated servers for CentOS.
• CONNECT -- CONNECT is an open source software solution that lets health IT systems and health information exchanges securely communicate with each other using nationally-recognized standards and guidelines. The OSUOSL serves as a main mirror for CONNECT downloads, and will soon provide hosting services for the main CONNECT website.
• Fedora Project - The Fedora Project is a community who's primary purpose is to lead the advancement of free, open software and content. Fedora, the Operating System, is the Fedora Project's flagship product. OSUOSL is hosting Fedora test servers, proof of concept hosts and other ad-hoc needs that Fedora often runs in to during the course of building a new Fedora release.
• Gnome-Hispano-- GNOME-Hispano is the Spanish GNOME users and developers association, mainly devoted to spread GNOME environment to Spanish speaking people. The OSUOSL has hosted a dedicated server for some time, and are happy to provide hosting for their main website.
• Linux Fund -- Linux Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides financial and advisory support to the free and open software community. The OSUOSL is now hosting the Linux Fund website.
• OSDV Foundation -- The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) is a non-profit public benefits corporation led by a group of social entrepreneurs dedicated to sustaining technology development efforts that create freely available, open source U.S. election technology. The OSUOSL is happy to be hosting web and DNS services for OSDV and all of their sub-projects such as the TrustTheVote Project.
• phpBB -- phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package, and is possibly the most popular web forum package used on the net today. The OSUOSL has hosted the website and various other services for phpBB for years, and this year we brought in two new servers which the project purchased to help expand infrastructure to meet the needs of their growing community including: the phpBB Code Forge, wiki, mailing lists, and more.
• Rock the Vote -- Rock the Vote uses music, popular culture and new technologies to engage and incite young people to register and vote in every election. Their online registration application has been re-written by OSDV using open source technologies and we are happy to provide hosting for the registration application which we expect to help millions of people to register to vote.

Please forgive me if I've forgotten anyone in the above list. As you can see, it's been a busy year! For a (mostly) full list of projects hosted at OSUOSL, see http://osuosl.org/services/hosting/communities.

This past year has been busy for our development work as well. We've worked on a number of projects including (in no particular order):

• OSDV tabulator -- This is the tabulation software for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation which was recently featured in a Wired Magazine post.
• PGD -- The Protein Geometry Database (PGD) was created under a grant with the OSU Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. The OSUOSL is responsible for most of the design and development work for this project.
• Pydra -- Pydra is a distributed and parallel computing framework for python. Pydra aims to provide an easy to use framework for writing and running parallelized programs for developers, and an easy to manage cluster for the administrators.
• Campus Helpdesk -- The OSUOSL has built the OSU campus helpdesk system based off of OTRS, and is currently hosting the helpdesk servers used by campus IT support staff.
• TriSano -- TriSano is an open source, citizen-focused surveillance and outbreak management system for infectious disease, environmental hazards, and bioterrorism attacks. The OSUOSL had two students working on development with the TriSano team.
• ORVSD -- ORVSD, the Oregon Virtual School District continues to grow as more schools and districts around Oregon adopt it as a way to provide their students with an online learning system (Moodle-based) and web sites for schools and districts (Drupal-based). The OSUOSL continues to provide hosting and development for this project sponsored by the Oregon Department of Education, and it's great to see the benefit it provides to schools in our state.

We also branched out into something entirely new for us and partnered with the OSU EECS department to provide a Linux System Administration course. The course was taught by Lance Albertson and myself, and it was a great way to teach OSU computer science students about Linux and open source.

We made big waves in US Federal Government this year by taking our annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) to Washington D.C. We had a great turnout, and it is exciting to see so many government agencies that are using open source more and more in their daily operations.

This past summer we participated in the Google Summer of Code program for the fourth time as a mentoring organization. The number of amazingly talented students who are interested in contributing to open source continues to amaze me. We had four students participating this year, and they all did great. A list of all student projects can be found at http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/org/home/google/gsoc2009/osuosl.

2009 also presented the OSUOSL with many opportunities to speak at conferences around the world. I spoke at FlourishConf in Chicago, and we had three different speakers at OSCON 2009 (which isn't bad for only having five full-time staff!). Deb Bryant was even invited to Spain to speak at the International Open Source Conference. I think it speaks well to the expertise of our staff to see us so involved with these conferences.

A lot of my time this last year was spent launching three new fund raising programs for the OSUOSL. Friends of the OSL was created to help thank the individual donors who help support us, the OSL Alliance honors our corporate sponsors, and the Give 6 program was created to celebrate our sixth anniversary and to raise awareness of our need for funding support within the communities we host. I've been very happy to see so much support coming from our hosted projects, and from individuals who benefit from open source software.

Well that was sure a mouthful! So what's coming in 2010 for the OSUOSL? I expect our hosting services to continue to grow as we implement a new virtualization platform which will allow us to scale well beyond what we are able to provide currently. I also hope to see a lot of work done to create automation tools to help us with deployment and administration of hosted servers. Another goal of mine is to continue to grow our relationship with the OSU EECS department so that we can get more OSU students involved with open source both in and out of the curriculum.