Urgent - OSU Open Source Lab needs your help

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on May 01, 2025

Quoting: Urgent - OSU Open Source Lab needs your help – Gentoo Linux —

Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL) has been a major supporter of Gentoo Linux and many other software projects for years. It is currently hosting several of our infrastructure servers as well as development machines for exotic architectures, and is critical for Gentoo operation.

Due to drops in sponsor contributions, OSL has been operating at loss for a while, with the OSU College of Engineering picking up the rest of the bill. Now, university funding has been cut, this is not possible anymore, and unless US$ 250.000 can be provided within the next two weeks OSL will have to shut down. The details can be found in a blog post of Lance Albertson, the director of OSL.

Please, if you value and use Gentoo Linux or any of the other projects that OSL has been supporting, and if you are in a position to make funds available, if this is true for the company you work for, etc … contact the address in the blog post. Obviously, long-term corporate sponsorships would here serve best - for what it’s worth, OSL developers have ended up at almost every big US tech corporation by now. Right now probably everything helps though.

Read on

Direct:

• Future of OSL in Jeopardy | OSU Open Source Lab

  I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab (OSL). Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While the Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable.

  Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year. I have reached out to our largest corporate sponsor and they are working to increase their support as we update our contract, but that still may not be enough.

  For transparency, the $250,000 is broken down into the following roughly:

  Staff pay $150k (60%) (1 staff) Student pay $65k (26%) (8 students) Other expenses $35k (14%)

  Other expenses include items such as hardware, travel, subscription services and other miscellaneous expenses needed to run the OSL day to day.