LWN: Comments on "The state of the OSU Open Source Lab"

The state of the OSU Open Source Lab

error27 — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 12:32:15 +0000

Back in the day when my employer sold rackmounted systems we always had to ask about the door heights and elevators before we sold a system. They come with wheels on the bottom but they weigh the same as a small car when they're fully loaded.

At a trade show one of our customers said that they received a rack that was too tall for the door. It's not that hard to remove all the computers and then lean it over and carry it through. But instead of that they decided that they weren't ever going to need the top shelves of the rack so they took a chainsaw and chopped it to the right height.

This a customer so of course you congratulate them on their resourcefulness but inside you're weeping.

The state of the OSU Open Source Lab

taggart — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 02:49:23 +0000

Great to hear what the folks at OSL are up to, cool stuff! IMO they are an example of what _all_ public universities should be doing to both train students for the real world and fulfill their service charter. If only it was as easy to fork their organization as it is a repo in git! :)

The state of the OSU Open Source Lab

quozl — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 08:04:31 +0000

Recently I was contacted by one of the OSL team to help with archiving and decommissioning a forum instance for One Laptop per Child that had lost a DNS CNAME years ago. We had forgotten about it. It had apparently just sat there waiting for requests that never came. I was really impressed with the professionalism and care with which the ticket was handled. Well done!