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Hosting Policy

Services

In order to support our mission, the Oregon State University Open Source Lab provides hosting services for the Open Source Community. These services include:

  • Managed/unmanaged hosting – anything from a shared Web host, to a virtual machine, to dedicated hardware.
  • FTP mirroring from our national mirror network.
  • Various other services such as email relay, DNS, database servers, backups and monitoring. See our services page for more information: http://osuosl.org/hosting/services.

Potential Hosted Projects

Our hosting services are limited to open source projects and related community sites. In general, this refers to licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which maintains a list of approved licenses on their website: http://www.opensource.org/. Projects that release under other “open” licenses which are not OSI-approved will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

We provide hosting for various types of projects. Some are software/code-based projects such as Linux distributions, software programs, etc., while others are more community/communication-based projects such as IRC servers, forum/community sites dedicated to open source, etc.

We typically try not to provide hosting for smaller projects which could be hosted at other “free” hosting sites such as SourceForge or Google Code. We do not have the infrastructure set up to provide hosting to thousands of smaller projects, but would prefer to focus our efforts on hosting those projects that have grown too large to fit in at SourceForge but cannot (yet) afford to pay for hosting at a hosting company.

We decide on hosting requests by looking at many factors. One of the main things we look for in a project/site is that it shows a current or potential significant positive impact to the open source community. This is, of course, highly subjective, but we will do our best to look at all incoming hosting requests on an individual basis to decide if we think this condition is met. For development-based projects we also feel that it is important to have an active development community, which is usually characterized by both the number of developers and the frequency of code updates and/or releases. For community-based projects, an active, helpful user community is important.

We will periodically monitor our hosted projects to ensure that they continue to meet the requirements listed above. If a project becomes inactive or changes its purpose, we may discontinue hosting. All hosted projects must abide by our Conditions of Use Policy.

Funding Model

We are able to provide hosting services thanks to the donations we receive from individuals and companies around the world. Without these donations, we would not be able to provide this valuable service to the open source community. For more information on how to support the OSL, please visit our Donate page.