It seems a pack of Wikipedia goons have set their sights on the OzLabs page, and have marked it as up for deletion, in fact it’s already been deleted and resurrected once.

Apparently OzLabs isn’t notable or interesting.

I guess I’m biased, but as an Aussie I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve produced so many well respected Open Source hackers, and to have several of them colocated in my home town is pretty awesome.

Anyway, in case the page is deleted I thought I’d archive the important bits here:

OzLabs was a Free Software research and development group started by US-based Linuxcare in Canberra, Australia. The group was formed around Andrew Tridgell, and grew to a dozen Free Software developers, drawing members from the Australian National University and around the country.

OzLabs is notable for being one of the first commercial labs setup to work on Linux and Linux support, and also as being the largest and most respected collection of Free Software developers in Australia.

Several members of OzLabs appeared as guest lecturers at the Australian National University over the years, adding weight to the ANUs already strong UNIX and Linux curriculum.

Prior to the widespread uptake of broadband internet in Canberra, OzLabs provided a Linux CD downloading and burning service, which gave students and members of the public access to Linux distributions such as Debian, Mandrake and Red Hat, without the tedium of sneaker netting thousands of floppy disks. The CDs were provided in exchange for biscuits, Tim Tams were generally favoured and were sometimes used in late night Tim Tam Slam binges.

Upon Linuxcare’s withdrawal from Australia, the group splintered among several employers. The majority began working for IBM at a newly setup lab in Canberra, also known as OzLabs. The members of IBM OzLabs mostly turned to developing Linux on PowerPC and related areas, in conjunction with other IBM developers in Austin, Texas and Rochester, Minnesota.

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