CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Internet search giant Google has given $300,000 to the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.

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The lab has hosted work on some of the world's most significant open source software, including the Mozilla Firefox browser, portions of the One Laptop Per Child project, the Linux Foundation's main infrastructure.

The lab gets about 6.5 million hits a day from computer users all over the world looking to download programs.

Open source software licensing and distribution is designed to encourage public use and modification of the software.

The software is open for anyone who can look at the code and improve on it, so the software evolves as people get creative and fine-tune things.