The March/April issue of “Open Sources”, the OSEL newsletter, is now available as a pdf download. This issue features articles on students visiting Australia for Linux.conf.au, open source classes at Oregon State University, a profile on Darcs author David Roundy and more.
Would you like to be on the “Open Sources” mailing list? Email us at osel@lists.oregonstate.edu.
Michael Leibowitz, OpenOffice.org developer, gave an overview of the tools and processes used in developing OO.org. Particularly he concentrated on the steps a developer must take to get a patch into the project. A video of the presentation can be found on Google Video.
Google gave the Oregon State University Linux Users Group a visit on March 6th. The Googlers included Lori Welch, a Hardware Operations Recruiter from Mountain View, Ken Patchett, the Hardware Operations Manager from The Dalles, Josh Betts, The Dalles Facility Manager, and Trevor Sehrer, a hardware op. With them they brought a tech talk about managing large data centers, plenty of schwag, and pizza for all.
Thanks Google!
Eclipse Foundation members Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Ward Cunningham came to OSU to give a presentation in Professor Budd’s Open Source Development class. The title of the talk was “Software Creativity the Wiki Way.” Ward Cunningham is, of course, the inventor of the wiki-web concept, as well as being coinventor (with Kent Beck) of CRC cards, and part developer of the ideas of extreme programming. After the talk Bjorn blogged some nice comments on the experience, which you can read here .
Update: a video of the presentation can be found here.
Rene Reitsma, Oregon State Business Professor, presented the issues involved in creating an Open Source business and some of the strategies used by IBM, VA Linux and Red Hat. Attention was also given to the issue of total cost of ownership for companies using OSS to run their businesses. A recording of the presentation can be found on Google video and the slides can be found on the CS419 website.
Four OSU students successfully fund raised for a trip to the best free software conference in the world, linux.conf.au. The trip is now complete and all the travel log can be found at their homepage, http://pleasesendustolinuxconfau.info/.
The winter 2007 edition of the Oregon Stater, the OSU Alumni magazine, includes an article profiling Corey Shields and the Open Source Lab. The article also discusses the OSEL, our OSEL student evanglists Brandon Philips and Alex Polvi, as well as one of the students projects the OSEL is involved with, the Open Laptop per Child project and student Mike Burns.
Shown at left is Dennis Wolverton, photographer for the Oregon Stater, making friends with Tux at a LUG Hacking social during the preparation of the article.
You can find an on-line version of the article on the osu alumni web site.
The current issue of Red Herring names Scott Kveton, CEO of Portland startup JanRain, one of the magazine’s “Tech Tots: 25 Young Rebels Who Will Rock the World.” Formerly director of OSU’s Open Source Lab, and a member of the team that developed the concept of the Open Source Educational Lab, Scott left osu in June of 2006 to take the helm at JanRain. Way to go, Scott!
Open google maps, and take a look at 45°7′26″N 123°6′48″W. This otherwise undistinguished farm just outside Amity Oregon seems to have something interesting going on. In fact, it is the famous Firefox crop circle. Now known worldwide courtesy of google maps. In fact, if you scroll just a little bit south of the crop circle itself, you can see a number of people, including our Alex Polvi. Truly, he is out standing in his field.
The Open Source Lab is engaging the One Laptop Per Child community by donating the time of a student developer. Starting next week Justin Gallardo’s full-time job will be making OLPC even better. For those unfamiliar with the OLPC project it aims to create a low cost laptop for students in developing countries. A few weeks before this announcement Justin had spent a weekend to finish a port of Abiword, a word processor, to the laptop. In the future Justin will be working to finish up the OLPC development board cluster hosted at the OSL and working with Red Hat’s team to create new activities for the platform.