A Look at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab

“If you’re reading this article, you’re making use of OSUOSL.
But that’s getting ahead of the story a bit. In the beginning,
Albertson says that the Oregon State University president saw a
sign with “www.orst.edu,” and didn’t want to have the “worst” edu
domain. (Read it again.) That led OSU’s president to get in touch
with the folks running the Web site. Having drawn the attention of
the university leadership to the Web presence, OSU paid more
attention to hosting and eventually got into the business of
hosting for open source projects.

Timing was everything. In the post-dotcom bust, there was a lot
of “dark fiber” nearby and the university managed to get “cheap”
bandwidth by laying 11 miles of fiber to I-5 (at a cost of a mere
$250,000 or so) where the “dark fibre” was at. That would be key to
OSUOSL’s success, and is one of the reasons that the lab is not
easily replicated at other universities.

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