Open Source at PSU

For as long as folks have been exchanging source code for the public good, Portland State University has been a leader in the use and creation of free and open source software. This proud tradition started in the 80s, when Janaka Jayawardena, Mark Mason, and Bart Massey helped to put together a leading-edge volunteer student UNIX system administration team that eventually became the PSU Computer Action Team. It continues today with world class teaching and research around open source software development technologies and practices.

PSU's home state of Oregon and hometown of Portland have become an international center of open source development, from Linux kernel partners such as Intel and IBM to desktop developers such as Keith Packard of freedesktop.org and Cairo fame. We have a cordial relationship with the Open Source Laboratory at Oregon State University to the South, and are involved in the open source efforts of state and local government, of regional and local industry, and with local and regional open source development communities.

PSU's partnerships with regional and international open source organizations are sometimes financial, but more importantly are always collegial and cooperative. PSU serves an important role as a neutral and knowledgable meeting place for academia, industry, government, and developers involved in open source and related technologies and activities.

Any organization is only as good as its people. At PSU, a variety of amazingly talented people have come together around open source research and development.

Open source at PSU is currently spearheaded by Prof. Bart Massey. Bart is a man of many hats. He is an active open source developer with more than 20 years experience. His academic background ranges from physics to programming language implementation to artificial intelligence; he is a member of the PSU Laboratory for Learning and Adaptive Systems. Bart is lead faculty advisor to the Portland State Aerospace Society, one of the world's most advanced amateur rocketry groups and an organization fully committed to low cost open source hardware and software. Bart is a faculty member of the Oregon Masters of Software Engineering program; open source software engineering practices and tools are a principal research focus for him. Bart is the proprietor of a micro-business, bart-massey.com LLC, and has consulted extensively for the local computing industry and legal firms. He is also the Technologist in Residence at the Open Technology Business Center in Beaverton, a technology business incubator with an emphasis on open tech. Bart is the Secretary of the X.Org Foundation, which promotes the development of the X Window System.

Most importantly, Bart is a committed teacher and mentor who has helped PSU to lead the way internationally in bringing open source into the academic curriculum at a high level. His Summer open source software development course has been taught in the PSU Linux Laboratory for the past 6 years, and has resulted in a number of interesting open source projects and a number of new developers for the open source community.

A huge number of impressive folks make up the PSU open source team. Here's some bios of key PSU CS Faculty and descriptions of their open source involvement.

• Jim Binkley
• Andrew Black
• Wu-Chang Feng
• Dick Hamlet
• Warren Harrison
• Karen Karavanic
• Jingke Li
• Bart Massey
• Kal Toth
• Fei Xie

• CS 410/510 OSS, Open Source Software Development in the UNIX Environment, Bart Massey
• CS 572, OS Internals (usually Linux Device Drivers or BSD TCP/IP stack focus), Jim Binkley

• The XCB project, developed with students Jamey Sharp and Josh Triplett as well as others, is an attempt to supplant the 20+-year-old Xlib X Protocol C Binding library with an X C Binding that offers many advantages.
• Research in open tech rocketry, law enforcement applications and software-defined radio has been generously funded by grants from NASA, IBM, National Institutes of Justice and the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium.
• The Nickle Programming Language developed with Keith Packard represents 20+ years of effort on a novel and reusable design and implementation.
• Bart has led and mentored students for Google's Summer of Code 2005-2007, on behalf of both PSU (the only general University program selected as a Summer of Code organization) and X.Org. This has resulted in a number of nice student projects.

The SDR project concerns a number of applications of open hardware/software Software-Defined Radio.

Project 10-9 / Open VoiceBridge is a project to deploy open technology for speech recognition and SDR in the service of police officers in the field.

The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS faculty advisor Bart Massey) is an educational aerospace project at Portland State University, building the world's most sophisticated open software/hardware amateur rockets. The group consists of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff of PSU, and local community members—ranging from high school students to engineers in industry—who are interested in aerospace engineering.

PSAS is based out of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at PSU, and has members and advisors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering departments.

• The PSU Office of Information Technology uses open source infrastructure extensively in its mission, e.g.
  • Mail service (40K users, 300K messages per day): Sendmail + Cyrus IMAP + Horde.org webmail
  • UNIX systems management: OpenPKG.org + CFEngine. Staff contributes substantially to OpenPKG development.
  • Web infrastructure: Apache + PHP.
• The Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science Computer Action Team supports open source systems, trains administrators, and uses open source tools in its work.
• Jim Binkley's Ourmon open source network monitoring and anomaly detection system (developed with Bart Massey).
• Various open technology granting and funding activities have been pursued.

The PSU/Intel Linux Laboratory (currently in hiatus due to building changes) consists of about 25 seats, modern Pentium-class PCs with nice X displays. The space is flexible, and used in a variety of ways by the CS and ECE departments.

The Maseeh College machine room hosts a number of open source boxes, including the CS department server and x.org / freedesktop.org.

• Christian Science Monitor: Oregon city builds a reputation as a hub for software revolution, by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore.
• Willamette Week: The Rebel Alliance, by Zach Dundas.