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Future of OSU Open Source Lab in Jeopardy
- EMH333 1y agoThe 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 1y agoAm 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 1y agoNo, 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 1y agoIt'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 1y agoIt 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 1y ago$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 1y agoThat does seem to pretty clearly be what they meant, given the rest of the sentence.
- unsnap_biceps 1y agoThere are usually three main levels people talk about, entry, mid career, and sr. If you say SDE, I'd assume a mid-career person, which is 100% earning way more then 150k in Seattle. https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-seattle-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... has more data.
- bigfatkitten 1y agoIn Big Tech(tm) you’d have at least lead/staff and principal on top of those levels, who make even more.
- j_walter 1y agoCost of living in Corvallis <<< Cost of living in Seattle https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=United+States&city1=Corvallis%2C+OR&city2=Seattle%2C+WA https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- avs733 1y agoFrom a university grants perspective that likely includes benefits. Grant hiring math is Salary + benefits = cost Where benefits = salary *~.4
- dylan604 1y agoDoes "benefits" also include the tax contributions the company pays? After being 1099 for so long, those definitely sound like a benefit to me!
- avs733 1y agoI honestly don't know but I assume so. They technically call it 'fringe benefits'. My university has four categories of fringe benefits: Full Limited Partial Grad Health The only things it specifies are that partial includes social security and full includes life insurance. But given that whatever I set for a post doc/research scientist/etc. salary is the amount they are paid, I assume that everything else including payroll taxes are encompassed in that 1/3 extra for fringe.
- cycomanic 1y agoPresumably 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoBut'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 1y agoWell without actual examples from any supposed position, this discussion goes nowhere.
- cycomanic 1y agoWhat do you mean? We are discussing an example right here???
- unquietwiki 1y agoI'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?"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 1y agoThe lack of people who are willing to do the job at comparable capacity for $80k a year.
- skyyler 1y ago>I've been in the IT field for 20+ years, but I've never made that much in a year. What on earth have you spent your time learning? How do you have 20 years of experience but no specialized skills that bring a modest salary? Do you not have time for personal development while at work? I'm not trying to be rude, I'm legitimately curious.
- jmull 1y agoThe $150K probably needs to cover other costs, like payroll taxes. Perhaps other benefits as well? (Health insurance would be the big one -- in the rough ballpark of $20K).
- tikhonj 1y agoAssuming 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 1y agoThat'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 1y agoOh, 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/ercc/salary-report/unclassified_output.pdf https://hr.oregonstate.edu/sites/hr.oregonstate.edu/files/er... https://www.openthebooks.com/oregon-state-employees/?F_Name_S=Albertson%20Lance&Year_S=0&F_FieldName_S=year&F_OrderBy_S=Ascending&Emp_S=Oregon%20State%20University 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.
- klardotsh 1y agoAnd it's $124k on the west coast, specifically western Oregon. Coastal PNW is notoriously expensive to live in - sure, Corvallis isn't Seattle, but it's not cheap, either. Folks like to balk at numbers when it comes to publicly (or FOSS-donation-ly) funded salaries, but also balk at tying context to those numbers. It happens almost every time anyone dares try to pay their bills on open-source work: a flame war over "you don't need that number, you could move to your parent's basement in Arkansas and survive on $20k instead!".
- chneu 1y agoI grew up near/around/in Corvallis. $124k is quite a bit there. Food is cheap, you can find pretty cheap land/realty, etc. Overall it's pretty reasonable. That said, $124k is not a lot for what Lance does.
- fuzzy_biscuit 1y agoNot 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.
- firesteelrain 1y agoGP is pointing out that OSU Open Source Lab is only in jeopardy because a majority of the shortfall is in labor costs. 86% to be exact.
- Ar-Curunir 1y agoYes, maintaining stuff requires labour, and people who do that labour deserve to be paid for it. What’s so surprising about that?
- firesteelrain 1y agoGiven that it’s a surprise to everyone, it is surprising. Since it’s open source people expect it to be done via donation to unpaid volunteers.
- Ar-Curunir 1y agoWho is it surprising except you?
- firesteelrain 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "In Comments Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
- Ar-Curunir 1y ago
- johnvanommen 1y ago> 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? When I was doing AIX and Solaris system administration in Salem Oregon, they paid me $75 an hour. A lot of people here are comparing Corvallis to Seattle, but they’re hundreds of miles apart. Salem is the nearest big city. TBH, making $75 an hour in Salem was like making $150 an hour in Seattle. You can live REALLY WELL on $75 an hour in Corvallis.
- svnt 1y agoMaybe ten years ago, but not since the pandemic. Seattle is still more expensive, but $150k is just buy-a-house and have-a-kid money in Corvallis anymore.
- erikerikson 1y agoAnd that $75 an hour (which annualizes to $156,000) doesn't include employer overhead (taxes, benefits, etc.) which can double their cost.
- Ar-Curunir 1y agoNo? Less qualified software engineers make more with less experience, and while doing orders of magnitude less important work
- mulmen 1y agoNo, it doesn’t seem excessive at all to me. If the lab delivered the same services for $2.5mil would you still be questioning that $150k salary?
- jimbob45 1y agoThat’s going to be a tough sell to any company. At some point, this is less of a charity and more of a failing company.
- bananapub 1y agoI really am constantly surprised at how foolish some posters on this site are, but your comment is pretty exceptional even by recent low standards. do you actually know what OSUOSL is and what it does? do you care? if not, why are you even commenting on this post?
- saagarjha 1y agoThis is not a company. It is not expected to turn a profit.
- _mlbt 1y agoOregon State University has a $1.651 billion endowment according to Wikipedia… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment 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 1y agoMost 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 1y agoThe 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/936022772/202540569349301224/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/936...
- Vortigaunt 1y agoI ctrl-f'd Oregon State and didn't find it in the link you provided. I think you found UofO's endowment: University of Oregon - $1.651 Wikipedia states that OSU's endowment is $829.9 million (2023).[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_State_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_State_University
- _mlbt 1y agoYou’re right, I mixed them up! Thanks for correcting me on that.
- dvrj101 1y agopeople have started using the word "endowment" against colleges like it's a term for slush fund.
- aseipp 1y agoWhen 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 1y agoI was always happily surprised to find that they were hosting what I needed when I needed it. A great lab with a long history.
- devwastaken 1y ago[flagged]
- floren 1y agoI hear Microsoft loves open source, so they should be able to step up and cover this, right?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- firesteelrain 1y agoWhy stop there? Facebook, Google, OpenAI, Netflix, Amazon…
- kev009 1y agoA 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 1y agoOSUOSL 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 1y agoAs 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 1y agoLance 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 1y agoOSU 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.
- damnitbuilds 1y agoOpenAI should fund them - they're obviously very heavily behind Open Source, as it's what they were created to do. https://help.openai.com/en/collections/12496919-open-source https://help.openai.com/en/collections/12496919-open-source Ah.
- mburns 1y agoThe 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.
- ecnahc515 1y agoI 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 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/ 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.
- chneu 1y agoSame. I helped out/worked there out of high school(back around 2010). One of the best experiences of my life. I still prefer to use the OSL for my linux repos.
- mulderc 1y agoI 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.
- mulderc 1y agoLink to donation page: https://osuosl.org/donate/ https://osuosl.org/donate/
- sregister 1y agoJensen is an OSU alum--it would be nice if this reached him.
- don-bright 1y agoThey 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
- Grae 1y agoA 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 https://give.fororegonstate.org/PL1Uv3Fkug, or click through from the general donation page.
- myself248 1y agoOooo dang, the lack of an "opt out of future emails" checkbox really gives me pause there. Charitable donations are second only to vehicle purchases in the avalanche of shit they trigger. Welp. Did it anyway. There's a "make my donation anonymous" checkbox on the second page, but that doesn't actually specify whether it opts out of emails, or merely hides my name from some list. Well, it's worth it either way.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoUse the hyphenated email filter trick.
- PNewling 1y agoWhat is this trick?
- mensetmanusman 1y agohttps://danq.me/2017/09/26/gmail-plus/ https://danq.me/2017/09/26/gmail-plus/
- phatskat 1y ago
- gkanai 1y agoI was with Mozilla when OSU's OSL was supporting the mirroring/serving of Firefox and Thunderbird globally. They were a key mirror/supporter during the early days of Mozilla and definitely contributed to the growth of Firefox.
- pimlottc 1y ago> 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. I suspect this is related to the recent Trump administration actions to withhold funding from colleges and universities. OSU already voted to increase tuition recently amid concerns about future federal funding [0]: > “New federal priorities and proposed funding cuts, especially for research, may have direct, negative consequences for OSU,” [OSU President Jayathi Murthy] said. 0: https://archive.is/iGX5X https://archive.is/iGX5X
- nl 1y ago"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." Why wouldn't they name the sponsor? Seems like a great thing some company (presumably Google?[1]) is doing, but they don't get the credit they deserve. [1] "Google sponsors the OSL through financial grants." (Noting that none of the other sponsors seem to provide financial grants) https://osuosl.org/sponsors/ https://osuosl.org/sponsors/
- pabs3 1y agoThey should reach out to IBM too, since POWER and Z hardware are mostly an IBM thing. ARM should be willing to help too, since they host AARCH64 stuff too.
- junar 1y ago"Below are groups who supported the Open Source Lab through annual contributions of $25,000 or more during fiscal years 2019 and 2020." It seems that all of them have contributed financially (though of course, it's unclear which ones do so at present).
- nl 1y ago"annual contributions of $25,000" I think includes hardware/service contributions (eg the IBM hardware and the bandwidth suppliers). It's a bit unclear though.
- ajdlinux 1y agoGive them the credit after the sponsor actually finalises the updated contract.
- ThinkBeat 1y agoI find it odd that they can provide all the infrastructure compute / storage / bandwidth for all of these projects for $35K Debian and Fedora on their own must be highly demanding?? Form the article: """ Currently provides infrastructure hosting for projects such as Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot/Busybox, Inkscape, Cinc and many more! """
- pabs3 1y agoMost of Debian's infra is elsewhere, but OSU does host a backup server, logs server, a bugs.d.o frontend, POWER/MIPS/HPPA/RISC-V build/porting servers. https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi Similarly, I assume RedHat hosts most of Fedora's infra and OSU does POWER/IBM Z stuff for them.
- bigfatkitten 1y agoI would've assumed that Red Hat/Fedora are well-catered for now in terms of POWER and Z, considering who now owns Red Hat.
- bonzini 1y agoYou'd be surprised, this is one of the ways in which Red Hat stays independent from their mothership. IBM prefers to donate to OSUOSL and Red Hat uses it for Fedora. Then there are private labs, internal to Red Hats, that are used by developers especially for testing, but they're not stocked particularly better than they were prior to the acquisition.
- richardwhiuk 1y agoBandwidth is donated by TDS Telecom. I suspect that physical hosting is provided by the University and servers seem to be provided by IBM.
- altairprime 1y agoThey need university budget for items that aren’t donated in-kind rather than as cash by sponsors. Build servers can be donated by granting OSU access and paying the bill. But someone has to manage those donated services, and none of the existing donation agreements apparently include cash on table to pay for that headcount (since they did not until this year).
- phillipcarter 1y agoI didn't work at OSL directly, but I did work for the sibling organization (then called BSG, now called CAAS) and it's sad to see this. I donated and would encourage other reads to do so too. OSL and the sibling organizations at OSU are such an incredible program for students, and OSL in particular has had an outsized impact on the OSS ecosystem relative to its size and cost. Moreover, it's institutions like this which represent some of the best of the software world, and we can't let them fall by the wayside as the capitalistic focus of larger companies just gobbles everything up with little regard for what they destroy.
- system7rocks 1y agoI am not working in the computer science field any more, but my experience working with computer systems in an environment like this helped me gain a lot of confidence as an individual. This is amazing work and deserves to be funded!
- musicale 1y agoI want to go to Open Source University!
- kinow 1y agoLearned about the OSL way back in Brazil via their support to Open Source and some of their alumni who worked in OSS projects too. I hope they figure out a way forward. And I was surprised to see they ask funding for a single position. Always imagined they would be a team of 3-7 engineers.
- Firefishy 1y agoI help to run the OpenStreetMap infrastructure, and for many years the OSUOSL has generously hosted some of our servers. Without OSUOSL OpenStreetMap would be more difficult to host and significantly slower to access from North America. I hope OSUOSL can get the financial support they rightfully deserve.
- eunos 1y agoOOT, How'd you distinguish between Oklahoma, Oregon and Ohio State University when you see the word OSU?
- myself248 1y agoOSU.edu is Ohio, all others have their own domains. This is also why Michigan State is the one true MSU, etc. (Being a Michigander, it pains me to give Ohio any credit for anything, but that goes to show how much I think this is a sensible way to distinguish them.)
- genunix 1y agoThe donation page is not easy to use and one must search the drop down menu for the tag "Open Source Lab Fund". However it is worth the effort. I did my part.