08/16/2008

Associated Press

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab has friends in high places: Internet search giant Google has given $300,000 to the lab.

The lab has hosted some of the world's most significant open source efforts, including the Mozilla Firefox browser, portions of the One Laptop Per Child project, the Linux Foundation's main infrastructure and the Apache Web server.

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

Open source is a method and philosophy for software licensing and distribution designed to encourage 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.

The gift increases Google's overall support for the OSU Open Source Lab to $750,000.

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Information from: Gazette-Times, http://www.gtconnect.com