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."

Comments

psf?

[3770]

Excuse an ignorant Swede, but what the heck is psf, number 4 on the list?

Re:psf?

[Bob Loblaw]

http://www.google.ca/search?q=psf

Python Software Foundation would be my guess since it comes up first in Google.

Re:"Breakdown"

[michalf]

of course. about 5500 people that were rejected ;-)
it was a sort of lottery. imho if you had an independent project not following the ideas posted earlier by the mentoring organizations - your chances were low - judgin on some discussions after acceptance/rejection of proposals.

mine got rejected ;-)

michal

Re:13 google

[behdad]

Indeed they are opening some of their small projects, moving development to SourceForge.net. See http://code.google.com/ for a list. Small still, but nonzero.

Re:$_$

[inode_buddha]

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".

Re:Where are the proposal details?

[Nimrangul]

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."

So...

[JamesTRexx]

FreeBSD in third place. So who is dead now? :-P

Re:So...

[pegasustonans]

So who is dead now?

Well, everybody over 150 for starters...

Dear Michal

[TimeTraveler1884]

mine got rejected ;-)

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.

Re:$_$

[commodoresloat]

Anyone else think it's a little odd to be pushing open source development with cash?

Yes, they should really be using bash.

Re:gnome?

[grilo]

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:

• People think GNOME is pretty much feature complete, regarding high level enhacement possibilities.
• People are afraid of developing stuff for GNOME due to some issues (real or not) with the platform itself.
• People that use and prefer GNOME have a more broad view of their system, and think GNOME is just another component, instead of their whole computer experience, thus thinking there are other areas that need more attention than their Desktop Environment.

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:

1. The ammount of people with spirit of initiative, high coding skills, creative and rethorical (afterall, you got to convince them you are "worthy").
2. People that have their kids starving and really need this to feed them.

So, either KDE attracts super human beings or GNOME attracts only rich bastards to whom 1000 dollars mean nothing.

Re:gnome?

[pantherace]

The reason for this is not Gnome being up to snuff, but that distros will customize Gnome. Gentoo relies on what the project itself provides, and Gnome doesn't provide things very well out of the box. Thus Gnome on Gentoo requires a lot of user-tweaking. KDE provides a much more higher baseline, thus, distros don't need to do as much customization. (Additionally, while Gnome seems to require tailoring, Red Hat's (relatively minor, once actually looked at) changes to KDE created a large outcry.)

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.