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Google Launches Summer of Code
chrisd writes "We're very happy to launch the Summer of Code today, and I thought Slashdot readers would be interested and might even help us spread the word (We have a flyer, even). The program is designed to give computer science, and other, students a stipend ($4500) while they learn to release and create open source software. We're working with a variety of Open Source software foundations and organizations and we hope to sign up around 200 developers. We hope the end result will be more open source developers! I'll be pleased to answer questions in the comment stream about this program. Thanks!"
I thought Slashdot readers would be interested WRONG!!
Hold on a moment. They are offering Slashdotters money to program open source! How is that not right up the alley of "News for Nerds" and "Stuff that Matters?"
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The one question I have is this: Why just students?
If you open it up to everyone, it's harder to tell if the person will get the intended benefit out of it: education. Experienced coders could participate just for the money. The program isn't supposed to be mainly about the money, it's just there to get college students' eyes on developing open source software as an option.
Lacking a date on the flyer, I don't know if this is Google's fault or it just took a while to hit slashdot. Good idea, anyway.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
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No your absolutely right.
Whether or not the whingers are getting louder, or I'm getting older the trolls are definitely beginning to drone on.
If there was somewhere else to go I would be there.
Google like everyone else makes mistakes (the cache thing...), but this initiative will hopefully open the eyes of at least a few students, and if we end up with another Linus or Bram type character, then the world will be a better place.
liqbase
This is spectacular. I mean talk about giving back to the community. I wish that google would pay the students on a bi-weekly basis though. When I was a student I would have leaped at this opportunity, but the lack of a stream of cash would have made it extremely difficult to take.
It is more of a motivator to give the cash in one lump sum at the end of the summer, and it reduces the possibility for fraud, but many students need cash to scrape by.
Anyways, go google, I hope these 200 student developers do amazing things over this summer!
A shill for Google? If any other company were putting up close to a million dollars in bounty money for open-source development, it'd be huge news. Hell, Novell offered $25000 in GNOME bounties a year ago and we got at least two separate /. stories about it. This is exactly the sort of news for nerds that /. exists to report (as are, incidently, both of the other Google stories on the FP). Should /. just start rejecting all stories pertaining to Google, just because Google is working on a lot of cool stuff?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Google wants to encourage the development of open-source software partly out of the goodness of their hearts, partly as a PR tactic, and partly to take a stab at MS. This program is only for students because they want to encourage new developers to work on open-source projects. Also, they may get a tax writeoff or something.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
At a guess, google are building a corporate strategy around the first two technologies and would like these projects to yield results that they would find useful.
Normally I dislike arguments of the form "it's their dollar so they can do what they like" but in this case, it doesn't seem to odious a restriction.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Excellent idea to have them write a product specification, than have to MEET the spec to get paid.
This is fantastic - nice work to those who hatch the idea and created this great project.
I'm surprised to see that the Mozilla Foundation isn't on the list of participating organizations. Seems they'd be a good fit.
Anyhow, bravo!
It is a million dollar cash outlay. Please don't forget that we're also donating money to the organizations that are helping out with the Summer of Code. $500 per project.
If you like an organization and want to see a donation go their way, then select that org on your project proposal.
Our main idea is to help out the students, but we also recognize that the OSS organizations will be helping us out, and we want to help them in return.
The point of this is to get people into the OSS fold who might otherwise just go down the all-proprietary path. A semi-commercial programmer who currently does some OSS programming doesn't need the help as much, they're already among the converted.
Also, $4500 is a lot more money in relative terms to a college student than it is to someone who's gotten their first 'real' paycheck, so perhaps Google thinks they'll get more effort out of their money by buying from the cheap labor market that students effectively are.
I've always thought that Google would be a great company to take the "Google Answers" concept of micro-payments paid in return for small tasks done on commission, to programming. Imagine instead of trolling the search engines and coming back with information, you had a site where people who had some annoying bug in an OSS program that they hated, or wanted some particular tweak or even a script written, could post a description of the change they desired along with a bid...then programmers could accept the task anonymously and get paid upon its completion. More complex tasks would go to more experienced programmers for a higher fee, and smaller ones to script kiddies just looking to make some pizza/beer bucks, according to market forces. You could even come up with a trust model for the programmers and the 'patrons' commissioning the code...and if you mandated that all the resultant code was GPLed, the benefit to the community might be huge.
I think the demand for an open market for small coding projects like that is huge, and to my knowledge there's nothing that quite fits it currently.
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I was gonna try and fit a Soviet Russia joke in there but I felt it would detract from my post.
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Again, Google is following the simple rule of Don't make it a hassle for your customers to do business with you. Google's advertisements are the best out there that I've seen. They don't try to jump out at you, they don't annoy you with flashing pictures or insipid audio, and a real attempt is made to make the advertisements relevant to the person viewing them.
You appear to be under a misapprehension that you are a customer of google because you view their ads- you're not. You are their product. Their customers are the people that buy the ads.
For example, the product of a company selling fishing rods is not fish (since fish grow all by themselves), it is actually fishing rods. Google does not make people, it makes products to 'catch' them (so to speak).
You appear to be under the misapprehension that everything can be either categorized as either a product or a customer.