“One of the things we want to do is figure out how to build an academic path, not just in the lab, but into open source in general,” said Carlos Jensen, an Oregon State computer science professor.
By moving the lab into an academic program, director Lance Albertson said, the university hopes it can expand from working with a small number of student employees to educating 100 or more.
“We can’t hire everybody,” Albertson said, “but we can at least mentor them in some capacity.”
Former lab staffers now work at Puppet Labs, Google, Intel and Microsoft. Mozilla, the nonprofit group that makes the Firefox web browser, has hired steadily from the lab to staff its rapidly growing Portland office.
Former lab systems administrator Alex Polvi later started Cloudkick, which subsequently sold to Rackspace. And former lab associate director Scott Kveton is co-founder and chief executive CEO of hard-charging Portland startup Urban Airship, one of the city’s best-known technology companies.
There’s growing demand in Oregon for skilled software developers, and expertise in open source technologies is especially valuable.
Oregon software employment is up more than 10 percent in the past year, even as the rest of the state economy struggles to rebound from the recession, and the industry pays an annual average of more than $90,000.
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