{"id":6884,"date":"2006-12-13T12:16:56","date_gmt":"2006-12-13T02:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/2006\/12\/13\/ozlabs-disappearing\/"},"modified":"2007-10-25T14:43:16","modified_gmt":"2007-10-25T04:43:16","slug":"ozlabs-disappearing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/2006\/12\/13\/ozlabs-disappearing\/","title":{"rendered":"Ozlabs disappearing &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems a pack of Wikipedia goons have set their sights on the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ozlabs\">OzLabs<\/a> page, and have marked it as up for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion\/Ozlabs\">deletion<\/a>, in fact it&#8217;s already been deleted and resurrected once.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently OzLabs isn&#8217;t notable or interesting.<\/p>\n<p>I guess I&#8217;m biased, but as an Aussie I think it&#8217;s pretty remarkable that we&#8217;ve produced so many well respected Open Source hackers, and to have several of them colocated in my home town is pretty awesome.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, in case the page is deleted I thought I&#8217;d archive the important bits here:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>OzLabs<\/strong> was a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Free_Software\" title=\"Free Software\">Free Software<\/a> research and development group started by US-based <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Linuxcare\" title=\"Linuxcare\">Linuxcare<\/a> in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Canberra\" title=\"Canberra\">Canberra<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Australia\" title=\"Australia\">Australia<\/a>. The group was formed around <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Andrew_Tridgell\" title=\"Andrew Tridgell\">Andrew Tridgell<\/a>, and grew to a dozen <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Free_Software\" title=\"Free Software\">Free Software<\/a> developers, drawing members from the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Australian_National_University\" title=\"Australian National University\">Australian National University<\/a> and around the country.<\/p>\n<p><strong>OzLabs<\/strong> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Free_Software\" title=\"Free Software\">Free Software<\/a> developers in Australia.<\/p>\n<p>Several members of OzLabs appeared as guest lecturers at the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Australian_National_University\" title=\"Australian National University\">Australian National University<\/a> over the years, adding weight to the ANUs already strong UNIX and Linux curriculum.<\/p>\n<p>Prior to the widespread uptake of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Broadband_Internet\" title=\"Broadband Internet\">broadband internet<\/a> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Debian\" title=\"Debian\">Debian<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mandriva_Linux\" title=\"Mandriva Linux\">Mandrake<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Red_Hat\" title=\"Red Hat\">Red Hat<\/a>, without the tedium of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sneakernet\" title=\"Sneakernet\">sneaker netting<\/a> thousands of floppy disks. The CDs were provided in exchange for biscuits, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tim_Tam\" title=\"Tim Tam\">Tim Tams<\/a> were generally favoured and were sometimes used in late night <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tim_Tam_Slam\" title=\"Tim Tam Slam\">Tim Tam Slam<\/a> binges.<\/p>\n<p>Upon Linuxcare&#8217;s withdrawal from Australia, the group splintered among several employers. The majority began working for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/IBM\" title=\"IBM\">IBM<\/a> at a newly setup lab in Canberra, also known as OzLabs. The members of IBM OzLabs mostly turned to developing <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Linux\" title=\"Linux\">Linux<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/PowerPC\" title=\"PowerPC\">PowerPC<\/a> and related areas, in conjunction with other <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/IBM\" title=\"IBM\">IBM<\/a> developers in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Austin%2C_Texas\" title=\"Austin, Texas\">Austin, Texas<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/IBM_Rochester\" title=\"IBM Rochester\">Rochester, Minnesota<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Text licensed under the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/copyleft\/fdl.html\">GFDL<\/a>, \u00c2\u00a9 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ozlabs\">Wikipedia<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s already been deleted and resurrected once. Apparently OzLabs isn&#8217;t notable or interesting. I guess I&#8217;m biased, but as an Aussie I think it&#8217;s pretty remarkable that we&#8217;ve produced so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[28],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael.ellerman.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}