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!"

Comments

Re:Why just students?

[natrius]

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.

Re:Slashdot becomes a shill for google

[damiam]

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?