Students help Open Source Lab receive grant

RealNetwork Inc. rewards lab with $500,000 for work of two students

By: Mickey Clark

Posted: 4/20/07

"Let's get lunch, we need to talk," said Michael Burns to Justin Gallardo - and he wasn't kidding. Burns and Gallardo are pre-computer science undergrads who are making names for themselves developing software for a charitable cause.

RealNetworks Inc. rewarded the Open Source Lab with $500,000 for the Burns and Gallard creation of software to help educate children in developing countries.

The work they did on campus in the Open Source Lab may soon be in the hands of millions, and it all began with a phone call.

"It started with Mike asking some questions about networking on the One Laptop Per Child mailing list," said Gallardo, chatting via instant messenger from his laptop at the Capitol.

The One Laptop Per Child project is a non-profit association dedicated to developing $100 laptops, which can be used by children in impoverished parts of the world .

Since starting work with the One Laptop Per Child association, life has been busy for the two sophomores.

The laptops need compatible software and Burns volunteered to work on the project.

"[Burns] got a reply from a big name in the community, and got some encouragement from that," Gallardo said. "Soon after that, someone from the OLPC organization contacted him saying e-mail was too slow and called them instead."

Government officials had trouble designing a program which would open Microsoft Word documents.

"Actually, there was no way to open any sort of text file," Gallardo said.

Gallardo and Burns started throwing around ideas over lunch about making a working word processor for the laptop. After lunch Burns had an e-mail waiting from OLPC when he returned to the office. OLPC expressed interest in having a word processor developed for the laptop.

"But with one catch," Gallardo said. "They needed it finished the next Wednesday, and it was already Friday afternoon."

Gallardo spent a sleepless weekend working on coding and learning the system.

"Justin worked something like 56 hours in three day's time a couple weeks ago to meet the deadline. He didn't sleep," Burns said.

By Sunday night Gallardo had a working word processor. The functionality of the program was very basic at first, but "the code I started working on is now the base of all rich text input on the laptop," Gallardo said.

"The OLPC stuff goes a long ways. It is a kind of buzz word in the tech community right now as well," Gallardo said.

The ambitious work of the students attracted the attention of RealNetworks Inc, a major digital media provider, which already had its eye on OSU as a potential recipient of a charity donation.

After becoming acquainted with Burns and Gallardo, RealNetworks Inc. decided that the Open Source Lab would benefit from a $500,000 donation.

Though Gallardo and Burns are unsure of exactly how the money will be spent, Gallardo expects that it will be used to "continue to foster a great environment for student developers like myself and the rest of my team, to produce great software for the open source community."

There were no specifications of how they money should be spent.

"RealNetworks did not specify any projects that the funding should be used on, just that the funding be specifically for the Open Source Lab," said Jon Dolan, associate director of network services on campus. "Most is going right back into the Helix player. "

The Helix player is Gallardo's current project. It is an application that supports many media formats and has the potential to support media creation tools on laptops.

For Burns, the overwhelming support of the OSU community has been more rewarding than anything else.

"When your supervisor jumps on board with the project, then your manager, then your chief information office, then the president of the university, you have to take a step back and just pinch yourself," Burns said.

Dolan is trying to make it very clear that Burns and Gallardo deserve all the credit they get.

"They got into this project of their own initiative," Dolan said. "It speaks very highly of our students and of the quality of instruction here at OSU."