Dries Buytaert

Recently a reporter asked me to comment on the Open Source Lab (OSL). The OSL provides free hosting and support for the Mozilla Foundation, Debian, Gentoo Linux, Drupal, and many other FOSS projects. My comment made it into an interview with Scott Kveton, associate director of OSL, published at NewsForge:

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert says his project's hardware — two dedicated Web servers, one dedicated database server, and another email/CVS server — was provided by Drupal and set up with the help of the OSL, which provides bandwidth and power. "OSL helped us architect the setup, and installed all the machines," Buytaert says. "In addition, and this is invaluable on its own, they help us with the day-to-day maintenance of the Drupal infrastructure (e.g. backups, upgrades, troubleshooting). You know, it is still hard to believe that they give us such a remarkable service ... for free. It isn't very often that one gets offered a deal like this. It is safe to say that OSL is one of the Drupal project's key contributors.