Meet the Sponsor: Oregon State University Open Source Lab

A perspex sign on a black, carbon-style wall. In orange capital letters, "OSL"; below, in black, "Open Source Lab"

Meet the Sponsor: Oregon State University Open Source Lab

Community 

Prof Yaffle

April 26, 20252 min read

IMPORTANT UPDATE, 30th April

While we were proofreading this post and getting ready to publish it, we became aware of some terrible news: the OSUOSL is in very real danger of closing down at the end of this year due to recent funding changes, and they need immediate help. Lance Albertson, the Director of OSUOSL, explains it in his own words here.

This matters so much. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of US public sector funding, this could send shock waves through so many open source projects if it's allowed to happen. Please, if you value their work - and we all should - and if there's anything you or your employer can do to help them, we'd ask you to do so.

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It takes an army of people to create, maintain and deliver Kodi, but not everyone involved is a team member. As well as the obvious developers, graphics designers, forum moderators and similar, we're also hugely dependent on our sponsors for both financial help and donations of infrastructure. It's the latter category that we'd like to highlight today, specifically the Oregon State University Open Source Laboratory.

The OSUOSL is a nonprofit organisation that works to advance open source technologies, seeking to accelerate the growth of high-impact open source software projects, and promote a global open source culture of accessibility and increased productivity. The lab partners with industry leaders and policy makers to bring open source technologies to new sectors, including education, health and government.

To this end, they've been providing free hosting services for FOSS projects since 2003, and currently do so for more than 160 projects, including those of worldwide leaders like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Drupal - and, of course, Kodi. They offer world-class hosting services, professional software development and on-the-ground training for promising students interested in open source management and programming. The most active organisation of its kind, the OSL delivers nearly 430 terabytes of information to people around the world every month from its hosted sites. Specifically for Kodi, they currently host a significant 2U, 96-core system that runs most of our build systems, as well as separate platforms that host a big part of our public-facing infrastructure: the forum, the wiki, and our pastebin site.

We're immensely grateful for their assistance and support, and want to publicly thank them for everything they do. OSUOSL is primarily funded through grants, corporate sponsorships and individual contributions from the community. Please see their website for how you can help them to continue providing services such as this.