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

Wary of title....

[deglr6328]

Hopefully this venture will fare better than the Summer Of George.

Re:Wary of title....

[s20451]

Hopefully this venture will fare better than the Summer Of George.

I think it will. I mean, the summer is normally when I want to spend a lot of quality time indoors, in front of my computer, writing code, breathing recirculated air.

Question for Chris: Are you guys supplying the vitamin D supplements, or do I have to pay for that myself?

Re:Wary of title....

[chrisd]

We can't do everything, you know. I understand Salmon is a good source for Vitamin D, and it has less mercury than Tuna.

Chris

Re:Wary of title....

[ndogg]

I thought you said that Stallman is a good source of Vitamin D for a moment, and all I could think about was how disgusting all that hair would be to eat.

Why just students?

[interstellar_donkey]

I think it's wonderful Google is doing something like this. Then again, I don't think Google has done much that could be considered wrong as of late. There are two good rules of business that so many modern industries seem to forget. 1) Make a good product, which so far Google seems to be doing well, and 2) Don't make it a hassle for your customers to do business with you. If only other tech companies followed those two simple rules, they probably would be faring much better. If the recording industry followed these rules, they would . . . well, that's not going to happen any time soon.

The one question I have is this: Why just students? Sure, it's always good to help out students (especially with money), but there are a lot of people out there who are doing this stuff on their own. You don't have to be in school to be trying to learn coding or work in open source (some of us do it as a hobby). This really isn't meant to be a complaint, it's a serious question, and I'm sure there is a good answer out there I just don't happen to know what it is.

Re:Why just students?

[chrisd]

From the faq:

Who is eligible?

Students. Since the point of the program is to create new developers, we're looking to find developers around the world who have considered creating free and open source software but who have not yet taken the plunge. We felt that concentrating on the student population was a good place to focus these efforts.

Not from the faq:

Basically, You gotta start somewhere.

Chris

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:Why just students?

[tool462]

Money given as a stipend for students is likely tax deductible. Money given to a random Amateur Joe Programmer likely isn't.

Re:Why just students?

[capt.Hij]

How do you define a "student." I didn't see it in the FAQ. Do you have to be enrolled in an accredited program as a full time student? Can I take a class at the local community college and call myself a student?

Re:Why just students?

[Pantero Blanco]

If whether the applicant is a student next semester depends on a scholarship that they may or may not get over the Summer, are they still eligible?

Re:Why just students?

[Paul Slocum]

Dude, just listen to Whitney:

"I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be"

Re:Why just students?

[interstellar_donkey]

Of course a company should be able to make money, and that's hard to do when the major services are provided for "free". So far, the best known (legitimate) way to make money from an otherwise "free" service is advertising.

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.

I know personally I've clicked on more of these non obtrusive, non abrasive and (mostly) relevant ads in Gmail in the last three months then all the total ads I've clicked on since I first started seeing them around 93/94. (Not saying much, since I've clicked on non-Google ads three times in the past decade, and Google ads four times, but I think you see my point).

For those of you who pooh-paw what you see as "idol-worship" with Google, let me explain something: If a company is doing everything right, people are going to like that company. So far there is very little that Google has done that's "wrong". They have built a reputation, and continue to build a reputation of being "one of the good ones".

If they stay that course, I think in the long run there's a company that's going to end up the first "blue chip" dot-com, lasting for decades. That doesn't mean they can do no wrong; if they start producing low quality products or pissing off their customers, they can start going down hill fast. It could be argued that this is what happened to Netscape in the late 90s when they were bought out. New management screwed with the employees, so many of the good ones quit. Their main product went way down hill, and now they're doing their best . . . as a company to recover from that (don't know if that's going to happen). It could happen to Google too, if they don't stay their current course.

Re:Why just students?

[Kadin2048]

I think you just answered the question.

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.

Re:Why just students?

[pmc]

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.

Re:Why just students?

[Maximum Prophet]

Au contraire. Some companies like UPS think only the paying entity paying is their customer. Contrast this with FedEx where both the shipper and shippee are treated well.
Google would do very well to make sure that both parties in the tranaction, the Ad buyer and the Ad viewer are happy. If the ad viewers go away, so do the ad buyers.
Google could do worse than to emulate FedEx, even though UPS is more like the MicroSoft of the shipping business.

Re:Why just students?

[skubeedooo]

No, adsense is a product, your attention/clickthrough is the outcome of this product.

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.

Re:ZzzZZZz

[AKAImBatman]

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?"

Wouldn't this be sending the wrong signal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I.e. that if you work hard and write really good software, you will be paid fairly well for your efforts?

*and* a free t-shirt!

[Japong]

So here's the skinny: we'll give $4,500 to applicants who successfully work with a sponsoring organization or advisor to create innovative or useful open source software. We'll also get you a t-shirt to go along with the cash.

Holy hell... a t-shirt? I mean the cash, well I know Google has a ton of that, but where on earth are they finding these T-shirts to spare!? I hope they technology behind these Tees is open sourced, and machine washable. Think of how much further I could take my undergrad degree if I had a free t-shirt...

Re:*and* a free t-shirt!

[Parinioa]

I kinda hate to admit it, but it was the t-shirt that really got me interested

Re:*and* a free t-shirt!

[Duncan3]

Good thing for that T-shirt, becasue at 4500/summer, that's about $865/hr (assuming only 40hr/week for 13 weeks). After self-employment taxes, you're better off in a McJob.

Of course, if you live in India or China, that's a fortune. But I'd say any US college student should be able to do MUCH better interning.

which is it?

[fiftyLou]

When exactly is the application deadline?

The "summer of code" page says June 24th. The pdf linked from there says June 14th.

('Course if those were reversed I could've made some smart assed comment about the extra 10 days accounting for Adobe's pdf reader to launch).

Re:which is it?

[chrisd]

Crud. Thanks. It's the 14th. Updating the site now.

Chris

A little late...

[Embedded Geek]

It would have been a better idea to post this sooner. Many schools have already completed finals as of last week.

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Open source

[The Bungi]

Google just recently started giving lip service to open source, after some people noticed they had really given nothing back to the Movement given that their infrastructure is largely built on free software (or open source or whatever it's called this week).

What's the point of this, really? Why is Google suddenly so interested in fostering open source? And why only students? More pliable to the idea of giving your work away?

Re:Open source

[damiam]

Dude, thousands of companies run their infrastructure on open source without open-sourcing their own apps or sponsoring open source development. Google has gone way beyond the call of duty here; we should be commending them for that.

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.

I'm a college student

[herrvinny]

And I am definitely going to enter, as soon as I have a suitable idea. To hell with the money (although it is nice, I'll probably buy a Xbox 360 + games with it), I'd do it just for the chance to have "Google Project Assistant/Implementor" on my resume. Although, a bigger list of organizations would be nice. I hope more open source organizations jump in.

Direction

[miyako]

This looks like a really interesting project. I've often wanted to get into open source development, but the most I've done is to submit a minor bugfix to a project. What seems nice about this project is that it gives some direction on how to get started. I think the idea of hooking a student up with experienced developers also adds to this direction. The problem I've found when trying to contribute to open source software is that few people seem willing to help you get started.
I'm definitely thinking of applying, but why GNOME and the perl foundry but no KDE or Java Foundry? never been fond of Perl or GTK+ myself, and I don't know anything about Python or .NET so my options are kind of limited :(

Re:Direction

[NickFortune]

why GNOME and the perl foundry but no KDE or Java Foundry?

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.

Re:Direction

[chrisd]

We welcome those groups, but we had a limited amount of time to corral everyone. They can still join in. This is why we posted the mentorship faq on the site.

Man, the 2 minute posting restriction is killing me today.

Chris

Re:Thanks Google!

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

Just great

[Locke2005]

Our parents had the "Summer of Love", where they all flocked to San Francisco etc. to do drugs and have sex, and all we get is this lousy "Summer of Code", where we get to DO WORK on our summer vacation?!?

Spectacular

[spludge]

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!

Re:Spectacular

[gstein]

From the FAQ:

Can I receive half the money half way through?

There are some situations where we will be open to this, and only for full time students.

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?

Suppose you have a brilliant idea

[Hektor_Troy]

You've even worked on it a bit during your comp.sci. classes, but it's not done, nor is it quite working.

Where would you submit something like that?

I ask because along with a friend, I have been working on what we believe to be a highly innovative application for a neural network, that - if we can get it working - you will definately love to have.

Problem is two-fold:
1) It's in the proof-of-concept stage, and our first attempt failed to even be a proof. We think this was due to crappy data to start with
2) It's not something that fits naturally into any of the mentioned organizations. The closest is Apache, but that's purely because they have a ton of Java-applications already.

The most "natural" organization for our idea, would probably be Google itself.

So what should we do?

Re:Suppose you have a brilliant idea

[chrisd]

Apply. Sounds cool. Put lots of details in the application.

Chris

Re:Country Eligibility

[gstein]

Any student from any country.

(except for those countries the US State Department forbids us from working with... the "terrorist" countries)

So yeah... Canadians are welcome! :-)

That's why they ask students!

[DogDude]

Duh! You just summarized why they hit up students for free code: They're cheap! $4500 to a college kid going to a state school that his parents paid for is a *mint*. That's heavy drugs for a semester, or tuition if they have to pay their own way. That's the whole point. That's why companies fire experienced workers and hire young students: they're cheap and naive. $4500 wouldn't get me to even comment an open source program, never mind develop one.

Please read the mentorship faq...

[chrisd]

We didn't choose actually, we had to round up the groups who wanted to do this. The ones you see were the most interested. We didn't turn any groups away that offered up what we needed to make the program successful. Don't read anything into that list.

I'd love to add the KDE league.

Chris

Writing to SPECIFICATIONS! YES!!!!

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"Your mentoring organization will determine if you have met the goals of your application."

Excellent idea to have them write a product specification, than have to MEET the spec to get paid.

Re:Great, but what about existing OSS developers?

[gstein]

Google supports a number of Open Source organizations. We've listed those on the code.google.com site. We hope to expand that list over time. It is a lot easier for us to support (on a continuing basis) a dozen organizations than hundreds of OSS programmers.

The Summer of Code is about getting new developers interested in Open Source development. We're willing to risk that some students might not be long-term contributors, but there will be some that do!

Re:$4500?

[Ride Jib]

If you read further into the details, the compensation is not determined on _completion_ of the project, but if your mentoring organization thinks you have contributed enough work to merit the reward.

Great project - no Mozilla?

[sgarrity]

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!

Re:Missing option

[LiquidCoooled]

Technically, since slash is open source, then couldn't Taco etc become mentors for the next generation?

Now theres a scary thought if I ever I had one.

Re:Doesn't look so fun to me

[gstein]

No no no...

We didn't make this clear enough. Those are merely ideas. Come up with anything you want and write a proposal!

Feel like adding some new, cool feature to an existing OSS project? Fine. Want to write a plugin for a project? Fine.

It is limited only by your creativity. We asked the organizations to produce some lists to spur people's imaginations. Not to limit them to just those projects!

Re:Brilliant move

[gstein]

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.

Suggestions?

[corpsiclex]

I often find myself in the mood to tackle some problem (apart from work), but there are times when I just don't know what people need! It would be great if there were some sort of website where people could make requests to the open-source community. In the mean time, does anyone have any suggestions for participants in the Summer of Code?

As a matter of fact, he's an EX...

[LePrince]

ChrisD used to be a editor for Slashdot before he left for Google.

Some questions

[bigberk]

Are graduate students considered eligible students? (e.g. summer between completed undergraduate degree and upcoming Master's program). Yes, I need money.

Is a programmer eligible for this if they already have been developing open source software? In other words, they already have experience working with OSS projects and producing public code.

Re:Some questions

[chrisd]

Yes on both.

Chris

Re:Some questions

[Daniel]

Darnit, I knew I'd regret finally finishing my thesis and graduating...

Daniel

Re:Slashdot becomes a shill for google

[WinterpegCanuck]

Yeah Google, slow down. You are upsetting the status quo. Waaaay to innovative.

-Union Boss

I don't understand...

[appleprophet]

They say that they are doing this to help teach students, but all of their projects require many years of experience! How is an inexperienced college programmer meant to implement a bluetooth driver in Ubunto Linux, for example.

Differences

[taskforce]

This really highlights the differences between MS and Google. A while ago you could sign an exclusive deal with Microsoft to liscence some of their unused tech projects which they figured were too expensive/superflous to work on. Now Google is paying YOU to work on software which is free for everyone.

I was gonna try and fit a Soviet Russia joke in there but I felt it would detract from my post.

Wine Resources

[vinn]

The Wine project has put together a list of resources to help someone thinking about this figure out a project. You might find the following helpful:

• SummerOfCode wiki page
• Fun Projects page
• Wine's mailing lists and irc information