OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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TDS Telecommunications LLC has made a donation valued at more than $1 million to help operate the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. The gift brings TDS’s cumulative support for the lab to more than $5 million.
The Open Source Lab, in partnership with Oregon State’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, hosts more than 160 open source software projects used by millions of people around the world. Those projects include the Linux operating system, Apache web server and Drupal content management system.
TDS’s most recent gift represents 20 billion bits per second of bandwidth provided over three years. It enables Open Source Lab hosted sites to deliver nearly 430 terabytes of information to people around the world every month.
In addition to service to the global open source community, the Open Source Lab provides opportunities for undergraduate students to gain hands-on experience with open source software and technology, guided by professional staff who serve as mentors. Oregon State student interns typically work at the lab 20 hours per week year-round, developing skills as they interact with clients.
“It’s said that open source allows software developers to stand on the shoulders of giants as they build on each other’s work. In our case, a giant-sized partnership with TDS has allowed Oregon State University to develop into a world leader in open source,” said OSU President Ed Ray. “We couldn’t be more grateful to TDS, or more proud of the global impact this partnership has made possible.”
TDS, a Wisconsin-based telecommunications company, which serves customers in nearly 900 communities across the nation, including BendBroadband in Central Oregon, has supported the Open Source Lab since 2005.
“Over and over again, we hear students say that their work with the Open Source Lab was the most valuable part of their college experience,” said Lance Albertson, who directs the lab. “Employers compete to hire them when they graduate, and several of our alumni have gone on to launch very successful companies of their own.”
About the OSU College of Engineering: The college is a global leader in artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced manufacturing, clean water and energy, materials science, computing, resilient infrastructure and health-related engineering. Among the nation’s largest and most productive engineering programs, the college awards more bachelor’s degrees in computer science than any other institution in the United States. The college ranks second nationally among land grant universities, and fifth among the nation’s 94 public R1 universities, for percentage of tenured or tenure-track engineering faculty who are women.
Jill Cassidy, 541-737-6126, [email protected]
DeAnne Boegli, TDS, 608-664-4428; Lance Albertson, OSU Open Source Lab, 541-737-9975
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