Machines at OSUOSL at risk

[richardlau]

Refs: https://osuosl.org/blog/osl-future/

by Lance Albertson on Wed, Apr 30 2025

I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab. Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While OSU's College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding have led to a significant reduction in CoE's budget. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable and CoE needs to find ways to cut programs.

Earlier this week, I was informed that unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will be forced to shut down later this year. I have reached out to our largest corporate sponsor and they are working to increase their support as we update our contract, but that still may not be enough.

If OSUOSL shuts down, this will put at risk for Node.js:

• Linux arm64 release machine (note we're already losing the Equinix Metal arm test resources but hopefully will be able to replace with an alternative provider via Works on Arm).
• All Linux ppc64le test and release machines.
• Half of our AIX resources (we have redundancy with some in IBM Cloud).

[richardlau]

https://osuosl.org/blog/osl-future-update/
Funding has been secured for the next year. There are longer term items that need to be figured out (including relocating the data center, no time frame at the moment), but for now the immediate risk is gone.

[ryanaslett]

Im not sure who would have been added to this email list for the OSL, but it appears as though they do still have to move datacenters, which will likely impact a lot of what we're doing.

https://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/colocation/Week-of-Mon-20250623/000000.html