The Open Source Lab is part of The School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. Our staff are all OSU employees, and our student employees are all OSU students. We receive many benefits from being part of the University including office space, data center space, infrastructure, and a close tie to students who are interested in working with open source. We receive very little direct funding from the University, which is why we rely on external donations for our operations.
The OSU Foundation is an IRS 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, which provides many donors a tax advantage. Please contact the OSU Foundation directly if you have questions about your eligibility.
The OSU Foundation handles all donations for Oregon State University. The Foundation works with university partners like the OSL to raise funds that support the university’s priorities. For more information, visit their website.
Many corporations have programs which will match donations to educational institutions. The OSU Foundation can help you find out if your company has a matching gift policy.
If you don’t find your employer or have further questions, please contact your employer or the OSU Foundation directly to find out if your donation is eligible for a matching program.
Our annual expenses are roughly $400,000. Our goal is to raise at least enough to cover those expenses. The exact amount we need to cover with donations varies based on paid hosting and grant-supported funding we receive. Any additional funding beyond what we need to operate during this fiscal year will go towards expenses beyond the current fiscal year.
We get approximately 80% of our income from corporate and individual donation giving. The other 20% is covered through various hosting contracts we have with larger FOSS projects. The larger FOSS projects pay at-cost to help subsidize the expenses for the smaller projects and thus keep the vast majority of our hosting free. Below you can find a pie chart showing the breakdown of our income for the 2019 fiscal year.
Many of the services we provide for open source projects are provided for no-cost. We rely on donations to cover the expenses we incur providing these valuable services. Below is a breakdown of our expenses for the 2019 fiscal year.
Below are a few examples of where we have spent money in the past year:
Staff/Student Salaries: We spend nearly 62% of our budget on staff and student salaries. This also includes any benefits we pay to full-time staff. All of the students we employ receive higher hourly wages compared to the average OSU student worker.
Travel: When funding allows, we send our staff and students to open source conferences. This enables the OSL to stay on top of new technologies along with sharing experiences and ideas we have learned hosting FOSS projects.
Bandwidth: Our bandwidth is not free so some of our budget is allocated to support our network and the staff that support it.
Community Events: Another part of our budget is dedicated towards supporting community events such as
Beaver Barcamp and DevOps Bootcamp.
These events allow us to broaden our exposure to students at OSU and the community.
Infrastructure Equipment: A part of our budget is dedicated towards infrastructure upgrades and repair. This includes supporting services such as our virtualization cluster, database machines, web servers and other various core infrastructure hardware needs.
The OSUOSL supports a large number of growing, high-impact open source communities. This includes the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Drupal, and many others. For a full list, please see our projects page.
We have one full-time Director who oversees all lab activities, and we employ about seven to ten students at any given time.
Our foremost goal is to continue to provide world-class hosting services to open source projects. Should we fail to meet our fundraising target, we will be forced to reevaluate our priorities and eliminate some of the lab’s activities. This decision, should it need to be made, will be discussed with the OSUOSL Advisory Council, and decided upon with OSU leadership.
The OSUOSL has many sponsors who generously support our efforts. The full list of OSL sponsors is available on our sponsors page. We also receive support from many individuals, smaller companies and projects.
We accept donations online via the OSU Foundation’s website. Follow the link, or click the “Make a Gift” link on our donations page. If you are donating directly from the Foundation donation page, you can find us under “I want to view additional options” and “Outreach, Engagement, Research.”
You can also phone a contribution to the OSU Foundation at 800-354-7281 and specify that your gift is for the Open Source Lab under Outreach, Engagement, Research. If you’d like to discuss a large donation or a gift-in-kind donation, please contact the OSUOSL at donations@osuosl.org or at 541-737-9900.
The OSU Foundation privacy policy can be found here.
Please contact us at donations@osuosl.org to describe what you are hoping to donate. We often have a need for hardware, but would need to know the details of any potential gift.
We can be reached at donations@osuosl.org (preferred), or by phone at 541-737-9900.
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