Google is entering into a $350,000 joint open source technology venture with both Oregon State and Portland State University.
The universities will collaborate to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide. The universities will also help provide a bridge between Oregon’s universities and Oregon’s growing open technology industry, said the press release.
Leading the university collaboration will be Scott Kveton and Bart Massey. Kveton is the Associate Director of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab in Corvallis, which provides custom open source software development and offers facilities hosting some of the world’s largest open source projects, including the Linux operating system, the Mozilla web browser and the Apache web server.
Massey, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University, is a long-time open source developer and a leader in academic open source research and teaching. Kveton and Massey will coordinate with the School of Electrical Engineering at OSU, also a recipient of funding from Google.
This summer, Google funded a $2 million “Summer of Code” program, which gave grants of $4,500 to more than 400 students performing work on open source projects, including several hosted by the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL).
Oregon is also home to the Open Source Development Labs and Linus Torvalds.
OSDL last week launched a Mobile Linux Initiative to tackle technical challenges and support the adoption of Linux on handheld devices.
Motorola and PalmSource are enthusiastic supporters and lined up behind an initiative that aims to promote the use of Linux on cell phones. The OSDL Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI) will work to identify and fill gaps in the Linux platform and in the ecosystem above and around it.
“There is a lot of momentum for Linux on handhelds, specifically for mobile phones,” says Eirik Chambe-Eng, president and co-founder of Trolltech, a company that builds a GUI on top of Linux for mobile devices and has joined the OSDL effort. But because more companies are developing Linux for mobile products, there is a need to coordinate the efforts, he says.
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