The 60% number is the percentage of the budget, not the staff member's allocated time.
However, what do we know about the duties of this staff member? $150k isn't a very high salary for an experienced systems administrator
Firmly "Middle ground of the area"
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Grant hiring math is
Salary + benefits = cost
Where benefits = salary *~.4
They technically call it 'fringe benefits'. My university has four categories of fringe benefits:
Full
Limited
Partial
Grad Health
The only things it specifies are that partial includes social security and full includes life insurance. But given that whatever I set for a post doc/research scientist/etc. salary is the amount they are paid, I assume that everything else including payroll taxes are encompassed in that 1/3 extra for fringe.
What on earth have you spent your time learning? How do you have 20 years of experience but no specialized skills that bring a modest salary?
Do you not have time for personal development while at work?
I'm not trying to be rude, I'm legitimately curious.
Also: Lance is almost certainly working more than 40 hours a week. Also, he isn't just a systems administrator. He's a mentor, fundraiser, any literally everything else that is needed to keep the lab running. There used to be more staff, but it's hard to retain qualified individuals. He's been there for 17 years, he's not doing it for the money, he does it because the OSL is important!
https://hr.oregonstate.edu/sites/hr.oregonstate.edu/files/er...
https://www.openthebooks.com/oregon-state-employees/?F_Name_...
I'll summarize it:
$107k in 2017 and $124k in 2023. I don't know about you, but someone with 17 years experience could easily be making 2-5x that depending on the company and role.
That said, $124k is not a lot for what Lance does.
Regardless, we can definitely agree: Lance could be making a ton more elsewhere, but is a saint who cares about his work, and I appreciate his dedication!
How the heck do these people secure these high paying jobs? There is some club, and I am not in it. Sorry to rant, but that 1FTE salary is huge.
If you think $124k a year is high compensation for someone with 17 years of experience in Portland, your compensation expectations are way off.
Corvallis
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When I was doing AIX and Solaris system administration in Salem Oregon, they paid me $75 an hour.
A lot of people here are comparing Corvallis to Seattle, but they’re hundreds of miles apart.
Salem is the nearest big city.
TBH, making $75 an hour in Salem was like making $150 an hour in Seattle. You can live REALLY WELL on $75 an hour in Corvallis.
Seattle is still more expensive, but $150k is just buy-a-house and have-a-kid money in Corvallis anymore.
do you actually know what OSUOSL is and what it does? do you care? if not, why are you even commenting on this post?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_univers...
Would that be an option to save it if corporate sponsorship doesn’t work out?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/936...
Wikipedia states that OSU's endowment is $829.9 million (2023).[0]
They're not just a pile of gold coins in the university presidents basement.
A great lab with a long history.
It's a little awkward because the AI datacenter boon is a little bit of a revival for physical and systems work but it is limited to that and I am skeptical of the longevity.
Those days of having fun working on network stacks, operating systems, setting up FOSS development labs and being a good steward of things.. harder and harder to do and even harder to get started.
Regardless, they were always big users and big proponents of the OSS work I was doing. And I remember that. I think more than the OSS project support they do, the support and education they help provide for students is laudable.
I personally think corporate sponsors shouldn't blink twice at supporting OSU OSL, but I'm not surprised given the state of... things. And the individuals choosing to judge and criticize based only on a 4 bullet point budget are infuriating.
Well, I'll help. I've emailed to setup a donation.
Thanks for everything you've done Lance, OSUOSL. And thanks to anyone else who helps support them!
Maybe some unicorn billionaires could spare a few millions? Especially the ones who built their wealth on top of open source libraries or databases.
https://help.openai.com/en/collections/12496919-open-source
Ah.
In my experience, there isn’t a great on-ramp for learning to be a SysAdmin (or devop, etc) in a practical sense. Learning what it takes to support systems in “Production” with actual users, and all that entails, at some point requires a hands-on approach. Finding entry-level opportunities to do that isn’t easy until you have /some/ experience. The OSL provides that, and supports countless FOSS projects in the process. It’s really a great arrangement.
Obviously I’m biased, but the Open Source Lab should be viewed as one of the Crown Jewels of OSU.
Since graduating, I've also hired, and worked with multiple alumni from the OSL and they're always top notch. Anyone looking for interns or new graduates with devops/SRE or SWE experience should be looking at the OSL for talent. It's not too often you can hire a new graduate with potentially multiple years of production experience, especially in devops.
In context of HN/Y Combinator, https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/coreos was a successful container/Kubernetes focused startup founded by two OSUOSL alumni, Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips, which was eventually acquired by Red Hat.
The OSL is something special.
For a list of projects the OSL helps host, check out https://osuosl.org/communities/. You might see a project you care about in that list! As an example: they provide aarch64 and powerpc VMs for a ton of projects to do their CI/builds on.
One of the best experiences of my life.
I still prefer to use the OSL for my linux repos.
I used them a lot when I worked on OpenSCAD build system, there weren't a lot of places 12+ years ago you could go 'make -j 30' on a PowerPC or 'ctest' and have it run dozens of builds/tests in parallel. Really helped alot, that C++ template stuff would barely build at all on my personal machine.
Sorry to hear this
As is common with schools, parks districts, etc., the Open Source Lab partners with a 501(c)(3) organization, the Oregon State University Foundation, to accept tax-deductible donations.
For anyone who would like to directly support the Open Source Lab in staying open, please be sure to indicate "Open Source Lab Fund" on the Oregon State Foundation donation page [0]. Note that their form is *not* set up with any tracking to attribute your gift from your clickthrough, and that any general donations to the Foundation will likely *not* support the Lab in this effort to stay open.
[0] https://give.fororegonstate.org/PL1Uv3Fkug, or click through from the general donation page.
Welp. Did it anyway. There's a "make my donation anonymous" checkbox on the second page, but that doesn't actually specify whether it opts out of emails, or merely hides my name from some list. Well, it's worth it either way.
I suspect this is related to the recent Trump administration actions to withhold funding from colleges and universities. OSU already voted to increase tuition recently amid concerns about future federal funding [0]:
> “New federal priorities and proposed funding cuts, especially for research, may have direct, negative consequences for OSU,” [OSU President Jayathi Murthy] said.
Why wouldn't they name the sponsor? Seems like a great thing some company (presumably Google?[1]) is doing, but they don't get the credit they deserve.
[1] "Google sponsors the OSL through financial grants." (Noting that none of the other sponsors seem to provide financial grants) https://osuosl.org/sponsors/
It seems that all of them have contributed financially (though of course, it's unclear which ones do so at present).
I think includes hardware/service contributions (eg the IBM hardware and the bandwidth suppliers). It's a bit unclear though.
Debian and Fedora on their own must be highly demanding??
Form the article: """ Currently provides infrastructure hosting for projects such as Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot/Busybox, Inkscape, Cinc and many more! """
https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi
Similarly, I assume RedHat hosts most of Fedora's infra and OSU does POWER/IBM Z stuff for them.
Then there are private labs, internal to Red Hats, that are used by developers especially for testing, but they're not stocked particularly better than they were prior to the acquisition.
OSL and the sibling organizations at OSU are such an incredible program for students, and OSL in particular has had an outsized impact on the OSS ecosystem relative to its size and cost.
Moreover, it's institutions like this which represent some of the best of the software world, and we can't let them fall by the wayside as the capitalistic focus of larger companies just gobbles everything up with little regard for what they destroy.
Without OSUOSL OpenStreetMap would be more difficult to host and significantly slower to access from North America.
I hope OSUOSL can get the financial support they rightfully deserve.
EMH333•9mo ago