[HN Gopher] Future of OSU Open Source Lab in Jeopardy
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Future of OSU Open Source Lab in Jeopardy
Author : aendruk
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-04-30 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (osuosl.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (osuosl.org)
| EMH333 wrote:
| 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
| jawilson2 wrote:
| 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?
| skyyler wrote:
| 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
| indrora wrote:
| 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"
| nomansland wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| $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."
| thfuran wrote:
| That does seem to pretty clearly be what they meant,
| given the rest of the sentence.
| avs733 wrote:
| From a university grants perspective that likely includes
| benefits.
|
| Grant hiring math is
|
| Salary + benefits = cost
|
| Where benefits = salary *~.4
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does "benefits" also include the tax contributions the
| company pays? After being 1099 for so long, those
| definitely sound like a benefit to me!
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| But's usually not the argument being made, the complains
| (same in this case) are often about the salaries of the
| people doing the actual work. Sure I understand the
| complains about multi-million salaries for the CEOs of
| some non-for-profit (on the other hand I have the same
| complains about the ridiculous salaries of CEOs of for-
| profits), but if that's the nuance, it doesn't come out
| in the complains.
| paleotrope wrote:
| Well without actual examples from any supposed position,
| this discussion goes nowhere.
| tikhonj wrote:
| 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.
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| 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!
| dlachausse wrote:
| Oregon State University has a $1.651 billion endowment according
| to Wikipedia...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_univers...
|
| Would that be an option to save it if corporate sponsorship
| doesn't work out?
| jldugger wrote:
| Most gifts that fund university endowments are earmarked by the
| donor for specific purposes. And for the money not earmarked,
| you're competing against all the other priorities, including
| making up for various unplanned shortfalls of Federal funding.
| timewizard wrote:
| The Foundation itself has nearly $1b in assets. The problem
| with these foundations is they're often streched across the
| entire university. Which means the foundation behind OSL is
| also the foundation behind intercollegiate athletics and tons
| of other completely unrelated programs.
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/936...
| aseipp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| floren wrote:
| I hear Microsoft loves open source, so they should be able to
| step up and cover this, right?
| smitty1e wrote:
| In the John Mellencamp sense of:
|
| "Sometimes, love don't feel like it should
|
| You make it hurt so good"
| devwastaken wrote:
| open source only works when youre more than financially and
| location stable.
|
| corporate fascism has artificially raised prices across the board
| and ensured that the next gen must work far more for less.
|
| they work with gov to increase taxes, licensing and insurance on
| the individual while reducing for the corp.
|
| higher education is yet another corrupt corp. theyre not there to
| help you, but are the introduction to this system.
| kev009 wrote:
| 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.
| mitchellh wrote:
| OSUOSL and Lance specifically (the writer of this post) was
| extremely supportive of me during the early days of Vagrant and
| Packer. Lance tried many times to try to find a way for OSUOSL to
| help my projects but I don't think we ever formalized anything.
|
| Regardless, they were always big users and big proponents of the
| OSS work I was doing. And I remember that. I think more than the
| OSS project support they do, the support and education they help
| provide for students is laudable.
|
| I personally think corporate sponsors shouldn't blink twice at
| supporting OSU OSL, but I'm not surprised given the state of...
| things. And the individuals choosing to judge and criticize based
| only on a 4 bullet point budget are infuriating.
|
| Well, I'll help. I've emailed to setup a donation.
|
| Thanks for everything you've done Lance, OSUOSL. And thanks to
| anyone else who helps support them!
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| As someone who was a student at the OSL when Vagrant was hip,
| also thanks to Mitchell for creating Vagrant! We used it a ton
| for testing all our our configuration management.
| jratkevic wrote:
| Lance is a great guy and that lab for a decade plus has done
| great work and supported so much of community. Happily
| supported their start and will continue to.
| rdtsc wrote:
| 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.
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