Open Source Musing by Jeff Sheltren of the OSU Open Source Lab

Last night Facebook hosted an event at which they disclosed details about their "source code transformer" named HipHop. HipHop has some great potential for large-scale PHP web sites. Facebook claims somewhere around 50% speed improvements for common page browsing which is significant when you consider the amount of traffic that Facebook receives. This technology won't be useful to everyone, but I'm excited to see how people will adapt it for their large (but not Facebook-large) sites.

2009 has been an exciting and eventful year at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL). This year marks our sixth anniversary of providing open source projects with world-class hosting and development services. I'd like to take this chance to look back on what we've done at the OSUOSL this year, and what we expect from next year.

Our hosting services have continued to expand this year. We brought a number of new projects into our data center this year, including:

I wrote up a summary of current goings on at OSUOSL including our newly expanded datacenter, new projects that we're hosting and more. It's being hosted over at Google's Open Source Blog. The article is available here http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/09/notes-from-oregon-state-un...

Last week I was interviewed on FLOSS Weekly by Leo Laporte, Randal Schwartz. and Jono Bacon. It was a lot of fun to be on a podcast which I've listened to for some time now. The interview focused on the OSU Open Source Lab and our role in hosting open source projects, development work, and our annual GOSCON conference.

You can download the episode (#74) via iTunes, or listen/download directly from the FLOSS Weekly website: http://twit.tv/floss74

I'm (obviously?) a big supporter of open source software. I've been contributing back to open source projects -- at least with patches, package building, etc. -- for years, and using it for even longer. As the Operations Manager at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, I have the opportunity to work closely with many open source projects, and also oversee student employees while they work on various projects both contributing code and helping maintain the hosting infrastructure at the OSL. From my experience, open source experience has given our student employees an enormous boost when looking for their first jobs out of college.

What is it that employers see as a benefit of hiring a student with open source experience? I think that question has many answers that depend on the employer, but there are some general answers that are likely common among most employers. Here are some reasons that I think being involved with one or more open source projects makes you a more desirable employee:

I just finished filling out the OSBC Open Source Survey. I will be attending OSBC next month, so I'm excited to see the results. There were some good questions in the survey, but I could tell it was geared towards the CEO/Business crowd. The wording on some of the questions bothered me, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it...

One of the more interesting questions which I'm sure is at the front of many peoples' minds:
"Is the economy's turbulence good or bad for open source software?"

Here's the wordle generated cloud of my blog posts. Seems pretty cool! I think I say "community" too much :)

I've been doing some work on a new site for the OSUOSL using Drupal 6. Of course, I can't take all the credit, Greg has been doing the majority of it, but I've been pretty excited to dig into it when I can. Our future site (coming soon, stay tuned!) isn't overly complicated, but we're able to achieve some cool things using Drupal core and a handful of additional modules.

I've built openldap 2.4 packages for EL4 and EL5. Since many base packages link against openldap, I include an appropriate compat-openldap package for each --
EL5 has 2.3.27, and EL4 has 2.2.13. That way, all of the base packages which link against openldap will still work, but you can run the newer version of slapd.

The 2.4 release announcement outlines many of the features and can be found here:
http://www.openldap.org/software/release/announce.html

The packages/spec files can be found here:
http://staff.osuosl.org/~jeff/openldap/

Last week at OSCON was pretty special for everyone here at the OSU Open Source Lab. We were recognized by both SourceForge and Google in various talks which mentioned how important the OSUOSL is in supporting open source projects and communities. We provide hosting for projects that are typically larger and more demanding than what SourceForge, Google Code, and others tend to cater to. It's nice to be recognized for what we are doing, and I feel that we compliment services like SourceForge and Google Code very well.