Six years ago, I was living down in California and I remember Dad sending me a clipping from the Oregonian about this new "Open Source Development Labs" starting up in Beaverton. Working on Open Source sounded like a dream job to me.
I remember my first day vividly. I rang the front bell and waited. There were only 6 employees (I was lucky employee #7): a handful of sysadmins and a manager. Christine came, opened the door to let me in, and the manager handed me an access card. Policy was fairly minimal. "Pick a cube, set up your computer yourself. Install whatever you want, as long as it's Linux." The floor had space for about 40 people, but it was almost entirely empty. There was a computer lab attached; the main occupation of all the employees was putting computers into the lab.
I loved it. Coming from Morgan Stanley, a huge company chock-full of policy, this was a welcome change. That first day I got root access on the main webserver, login access to the main database, and the freedom to put whatever made sense onto the osdlab.org website.
A few years passed. OSDL grew, adding on marketing people, office staff, business developers, kernel engineers, CEO's, HR folks, lawyers, and on and on. Policies emerged. The website got outsourced, with a myriad of rules for who could post what where. Work hours got set (boo!) At one point we outgrew our space and had to move to a new, larger location.
A few more years passed. Expansion slowed, and a series of layoffs started eating into the staff numbers more and more. Eventually we got merged into the Free Standards Group, and most of the remaining OSDL folks were let go. I saw that Canonical was hiring; that sounded like a dream job to me.
Today I went into work for the last time. The place was nearly empty, just one manager and a handful of sysadmins among the field of empty cubes working to disassemble and take the computers out of the lab. No HR, no lawyers, no office staff, not really many policies left... I just handed my access card over to the remaining manager in an odd sort of symmetry.
Rest in peace, OSDL.