Google Summer of Code Project Breakdown
behdad writes "Google's Summer of Code final per-organization project breakdown is out. The Apache Software Foundation is on the top of the list with 38 projects allocated out of total 410 slots, followed by KDE, FreeBSD, and 38 other mentoring organizations. The accepted applications will be posted early next week. More than 8700 applications have been submitted. Thanks Greg Stein and Chris DiBona for the hard work."
Did anyone else think that the project had broken down?
Excuse an ignorant Swede, but what the heck is psf, number 4 on the list?
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Google? Google will have open source code? Is this a first, or am I just nuts? Has anyone else heard that THEY were to be developing open source code, too? I mean, yeah, it's obvious they want to tap into its power with the whole Summer of Code thing, but I didn't realize they were actually going to have code developed for themselves as well...
oh, yes. this is odd. I forgot that open-source developers drink water, eat earth and live in primitive cottages in the center of jungle/desert/iceland. have no other needs than internet access that is free and wear simple self-made clothes.
and yes, this is strange. I always thought open-source software does need any money - it was always here since I remember.
michal
No, I don't think it's odd at all. Just ask (for example) IBM or Novell. Or RedHat for that matter. Developers need to eat. They also need to pay for their home, car, kids, etc. Companies like Google need relatively cheap access to bleeding-edge tech, and the PR value of a project like this doesn't hurt. Anyway, last I checked "open source" is not mutually exclusive with "cash".
C|N>K
The proposal information for each project is on their own website, the ones accepted you will not know until Google releases more information, as noted in the link. "We'll post the applications and have further data early next week."
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
FreeBSD in third place. So who is dead now? :-P
home
I am glad KDE is way up there. I am sure no slashdotter can say KDE is doing badly at all. GNOME too, did not do that bad either. We surely have resources in the OSS world.
Dear Michal,
Yeah, sorry about that. Unfortunately your particular proposal did not align with my goals for total world domination. Your submission "The Free Simulator for Coconut-Swallow Aerodynamics" while interesting, would not have been useful as I have already researched this topic throughly and concluded ducks are the optimal fowl for coconut transport.
Sincerly,
Google Inc.
Actually, GNOME didn't do so bad at all:
GNOME: 12
GNOME/GTK-based applications:
Gaim: 15
Inkscape: 4
Total: 31
To this figure: add Ubuntu and Fedora, two GNOME-oriented distros, and I bet some of their combined 27 Coders will do something that's GNOME-related in some way.
And Apache is on the first place because it makes improvements to Apache are improvements to the web, and the web is what gives Google money. That alone is reason enough to sponsor Apache.
Yes, they should really be using bash.
The counts were not based on the organizations' utility to Google. Most of it is based on popularity, on the capacity of the org, and some feedback from the orgs.
The ASF ended up with the most because it was the second-most popular, and because they have a LOT of people available for mentoring.
GAIM had the most applications, but were unable to mentor all that many.
I am accepted and I am too geeky to celebrate that as it should have been celebrated. Doh!
"They are loading up with PHds and scientists. If these guys had any useful brains, they would be super rich already."
Excuse me? Maybe PhDs and scientists are smart enough to realize that there is more to life than just money, such as perhaps having an interesting and fun job?
There are many different types of intelligence, and the most capable scientists and engineers may likely not have the best business sense. That doesn't meant that Google doesn't have people with good business sense, too, though. Perhaps a little division of labor?!? (Microsoft does that, too.)
Because KDE suffers from featuritis?
Because KDE has a better infrastructure for further development?
Because KDE developers are more fanatic about the project?
I can surely say that at least one GNOME developer submited a proposal for a desktop agnostic enhacement (if you're really interested, you might want to check this).
Seriously, the possibilities are too broad to make a correct statement. But I can point some of the possible reasons:
I think the most accurate, though, is that KDE simply has a larger user base that have programming skills. I guess we can't be too far from reality if we establish a relationship between that (attracted people with programming skills) and the proposals present in this "contest".
I'm even tempted to speculate that GNOME (as a Desktop Environment, but certainly not as a development platform) is much more successful than KDE. Even if KDE's userbase is larger, it just means that people that use GNOME are much more oblivious to all this programming stuff, meaning it's prefered by Joe Sixpack.
Of course, all this becomes non-sense when you realize that Linux itself isn't even listed, while FreeBSD is so high (considering that Linux has a much wider user base and many more people contributing to it).
So, two possibilities remain:
So, either KDE attracts super human beings or GNOME attracts only rich bastards to whom 1000 dollars mean nothing.
So, basically it boils down to KDE being a more centralized, and consistant base, with usually a few custom (config) apps added in. However, Gnome isn't, so there's a lot more parallel effort to get it to the state KDE is in. (You've got to pull in a IM client, media player and lots of other apps which are part of KDE's base (meaning by that the common packages (kdegames, kdepim, kdemultimedia, etc), not just 'kdebase').
I happen to feel that KDE's way is better, but that's my personal opinion.
Well, Gaim is not so much of a GNOME application, it's just using GTK+ as a widget toolkit and glib for convenience. Otherwise, no GNOME technologies are used. On the same grounds you could argue that "scribus" is a KDE application because it happens to use Qt.
The documentation tells that it "integrates well with GNOME 2 and KDE 3.1 system tray". So one could argue that it's a KDE application as well :-)
Gaim also integrates with Nautilus and Evolution. IMHO at least some of those Gaim projects are about Gnome integration.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.