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
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.
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 Salem.
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...
A great lab with a long history.
corporate fascism has artificially raised prices across the board and ensured that the next gen must work far more for less.
they work with gov to increase taxes, licensing and insurance on the individual while reducing for the corp.
higher education is yet another corrupt corp. theyre not there to help you, but are the introduction to this system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EMH333•4h ago