About
The Berkeley Open Source Program Office is located within the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and serves as the central hub for coordinating, facilitating, and supporting open source initiatives at UC Berkeley, primarily within the university’s research community.
History#
UC Berkeley has a long history of leadership in open-source software development. Berkeley’s contributions span the gamut of computing, from the creation of BSD Unix in the 1970s—one of the earliest open source projects that laid the foundations of modern computing—to technologies that have defined entire industries like Spark. The university has also produced projects that revolutionized modern data science like Project Jupyter, community-focused initiatives like Scientific Python, and cutting-edge projects in AI such as vLLM and LMSYS. Throughout these efforts, teams at Berkeley have emphasized not only the production of software but also the creation of open and collaborative communities. Tools like Jupyter and other key pieces of the Scientific Python ecosystem were not created solely by Berkeley teams; rather, its researchers contribute to support the broader community with the university’s unique resources and intellectual vision, helping these projects grow into broad, robust, and impactful efforts.
To build on this rich history, the Berkeley OSPO was founded in May 2024 as part of a UC OSPO Network, enabled by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
