Not only is the Pacific Northwest home to Microsoft, it is also an active hotbed of open source development.
Google is banking on further developing open source in the region to a tune of $350,000, which is being donated to Oregon State
University (OSU) and Portland State University to fund a new open source
technology initiative.
The two universities will use Google’s funds for a joint
project that will see the creation in 2006 of an open source technology
center and organization. That organization will provide an open source
educational curriculum for the Oregon University System, as well as provide
student internships.
The funding will also be geared toward supporting and expanding
Oregon’s support of leading open source projects.
Oregon State University Open Source Lab in Corvallis currently serves as a
host to Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, which recently hit the 100 million
download mark; the Apache Web Server, which is now in use by at least 52 million Web sites worldwide;
and the Linux kernel (kernel.org).
Chris DiBona, open source program manager at Google, commented that he was
very much aware of the open source work that Oregon State University
had been doing
“I realized they had kernel.org, they were hosting pretty prominent
mirrors for Apache and the Mozilla Foundation and they had helped out in the
Summer of Code, as well by hosting a number of students,” DiBona told
internetnews.com. “So I was like ‘wow these guys really have their act
together.'”
The OSU, according to DiBona, has also actually helped to build community
through its efforts.
“The thing about Free Software is that it’s not always so easy to have
that much infrastructure handled by one group for another group, because it’s
very demanding on system resources,” DiBona explained.
“But there are a lot
of advantages. They’ve been building this great community around the
different projects and they’ve got this whole thing going on where all the
different foundations are talking to each other with them.
“They’ve been pretty remarkable actually over the last couple of years
with how much work they’ve done and how much code has gotten written because
of them,” DiBona added.
Google has been helping out a whole lot of open source developers of
late.
DiBona’s open source group at Google today also posted some of the
initial results from its Summer of Code initiative, which provided $2 million of funding for 410 open source development projects spread across 41 different sponsoring organizations, including Google.
According to DiBona, the final tally of successful projects exceeded
initial expectations.
“I have to admit going into the Summer of Code I was a little nervous and I
had to set my expectations accordingly on how many students would succeed at
the end,” DiBona said.
He went on to reveal that currently the completion rate, which has not yet
been finalized, is hovering around 84 percent of the students.
“I didn’t think that 84 percent would make it. I thought it would have
been more like 65 percent,” he said. “You know life will intrude and sometimes people don’t scope things well and that sort of thing. But they
completely blew the doors off and I was really happy about it. We all were at
Google.”
