Go Beavers: The OSU Open Source Lab

At OSCON I learned that just up the Willamette River from Portland, in sleepy Corvallis, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab hosts www.mozilla.org. Maybe you’ve heard of it. They also provide hosting and/or mirror services to Apache, KDE, Xiph.org, Debian, Gentoo, and others. In the early ’90s I briefly lived in Corvallis and this just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Public universities have a long history with open source – my server would not be what it is without Berkeley in particular – but I don’t come across a lot of explicit advocacy from schools beyond the level of individual employees or researchers who work on projects of their own volition. Public universities should be big backers of open source, I think, so I hope that OSU’s example is inspirational.