On Tuesday Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski announced the contribution of $350,000 by search technology leader Google Inc. to a joint open source technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State University. With the grant, 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.

"Oregon is home to many of the leading companies, institutions and executives driving the global market for open source software and hardware," Governor Ted Kulongoski said. "Google's support will strengthen the leadership role of our universities in fostering the next generation of open source technologies, projects and experts in Oregon and enhance our aggressive efforts to bring jobs and investment to Oregon's burgeoning open technology cluster."

The new open source initiative will create a joint-university open source technology center and organization in early 2006 to: design and coordinate curricula across the Oregon University System; offer student internships and expand its technology capacity for the growing number of open source projects and communities it supports; further the commercialization of open source innovations by facilitating linkages to the region's network of venture capital firms, technology companies and incubators such, as the Beaverton-based Open Technology Business Center; and partner on key educational events, such as the inaugural Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) recently held in Portland.

Leading the university collaboration is 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 and Computer Science at OSU, also a recipient of funding from Google.

This summer, also 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).