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NetBSD and Google's Summer of Code
ruipaulo writes "When Google announced the "Summer of Code", its program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development, the NetBSD Project understood the value of this project and entered as a mentoring organization. Over a period of two weeks, students researched the list of possible projects and discussed their proposals on the public mailing lists and in private with developers and other users alike. After evaluating over 100 distinct applications, the NetBSD Foundation is now pleased to announce the list of projects that have been chosen. See the associated press release for all the details."
A shocking report from Google CEO Steve Google indicates that Summer is on the way out.
"We really don't see this whole summer thing lasting much past September," says Steve, but our new 'Autumn of Some More Code' project should be ready by October at the latest."
When asked if Summer might be back next year, Steve Google declined comment.
You will also be familiar I am sure with the attitude adopted to 'dupe' stories which seem too similar to those preceding the one's more recently posted.
You may have noticed that the summary containing the links to articles ask questions of the audience, and sometimes propose argumentative points that can then be discussed by Slashdot readers. More often, this becomes fractured and tangential, and nested comments move a great distance from parent posts. That's a feature of Slashdot, I'm sure most of us wouldn't have it any other way.
This brings me to the small matter of your submission: You tell us what Google's Summer of Code is. There have been a lot of stories about it, one just yesterday covered the finalisation of the projects that will be worked on by students and mentors.
You tell us that students have spent 2 weeks deciding on what to do, and that NetBSD was an option. Can you explain why this is new? It may be of moderate interest to some, but is it exciting? Will it generate discussion?
You conclude by linking to only one 'article', and I am at pains to call it that as it is more accurately the raw materials which have yet to be made into an article for publication. It's a press release, and you say so right in the summary. They have their place, and sometimes that's in summaries, but I feel that they are ill designed to be an entire subject of a summary. One reason press releases aren't suited to being treated as articles is their blandness.
From TFA: Hubert Feyrer said, "Having to choose only 8 proposals out of over 100 was tough. We, the developers, had to evaluate each individual application based on a number of criteria, such as feasibility of the proposed project, ability and experience of the student in the research area, importance and relevance of the result to the NetBSD Project etc. etc."
In conclusion Submitter, we, the anonymous cowards of Slashdot, request for you, and indeed all submitters, to try just a little bit harder in your suggestions for content. Give it an angle, make it contentious if it is a contentious matter. If it's a small matter of 'NetBSD receives interest as part of open source coding intiative' it seems very much like a newspaper putting the weather report on page one, above the fold, with a large black and white image of the sky. Yours, Anonymous Coward
Has there been posted a list of all of the accepted projects for all organisations yet? I was trying to find it on the mailing list but it doesn't seem that it has been announced yet. I'm curious to see what kinds of things people are going to be working on.
I'm actually rather excited about this. NetBSD is turning into a damn fine operating system. The 2.0 release was really special. 3.0 is coming up soon (end of July, or that's the plan). Now, thanks to google, the project has a little extra developer muscle for upcoming releases. I really look forward to the near future releases of NetBSD. Hopefully things will just keep getting better!