One of the open source sector’s most significant incubators, Oregon State University’s (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL), is facing budget cuts and may soon shutdown. OSL is in financial peril due to a decline in corporate donations and the Trump administration’s cutbacks on federal funding for higher education.

“Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year,” wrote OSL director Lance Albertson. “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.”

He directed potential donors to the donations page, noting that the OSL Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization, which offers a tax advantage for donations.

Launched in 2003, the OSL has a storied history of supporting FOSS. The services it provides for open source projects range from hosting to managing their infrastructure. For many years it was the home of the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and Mozilla.

OSL hosts a veritable who’s who of open source projects, including Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot/Busybox, Inkscape and Cinc. Its virtual machines for x86, aarch64 and ppc64le are deployed by many projects, including projects all over the globe.

Given that the OSL’s software mirror hosts over 12T of data with 100 projects, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that most users of Linux distributions or open source applications have downloaded from the OSL at some point.

The OSL also helps mentor the open source experts of tomorrow. The Lab provides employment and critical hands-on experience managing open source projects to students, many of whom graduate and later contribute to FOSS projects. It also collaborates with companies, the largest of which is IBM, for which OSL hosts over many projects. Other collaborations include Docker, TensorFlow and the RISC-V Foundation.

Yet over the last several years, OSL has run a deficit as corporate donations have fallen. The Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has been covering the shortfall, but major changes sweeping through higher education have caused a collapse in funding.

Many colleges across the country are facing major budget cuts as the Trump administration has reduced federal funding for higher education, including for many facilities conducting scientific research.

Oregon State University has raised tuition for the 2025-2026 school year, with increases ranging from 4.8% to 5.3% for various student cohorts. In announcing the increases, the University acknowledged concerns about potential federal funding cuts, particularly for research—which is essentially the OSL’s mission.

OSU’s local newspaper, The Corvallis Gazette-Times, quoted from OSU President Jayathi Murthy’s comments to the university’s board. “New federal priorities and proposed funding cuts, especially for research, may have direct, negative consequences for OSU.”

If the OSL is to survive, it may be due to a renewed interest from corporate donors, for whom the $250K figure is not a daunting sum. Certainly any number of tech companies benefit from a healthy open source developer community.

Alternatively, contributions may come from alumni that remember the lab fondly, including those that gained major career advantage from its academic support. “I worked at the OSL as a student years ago, and it was one of the most impactful places I’ve ever worked at. I learned a lot, and I wouldn’t be the engineer I am today without having worked there,” wrote a HackerNews contributor with the moniker ecnahc515. “The OSL is something special.”