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Google's Summer of Code Over
yootje writes "The Summer of Code ('Google's program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development.') is now over. The result: 410 participants helping 38 projects suchs as Apache, KDE and FreeBSD. 'Among the project awards are both complex and simple innovations spanning the width and breadth of everything that the open source world has to offer. There are projects dealing with security, networking, VoIP, Java, mono, IP-PBX, online picture galleries, instant messaging and content management. There is even a game that Google's summer internship helped to pay for.'" Update: 09/11 17:15 GMT by Z : Added the story link at submittor's request.
LOL, I forgot to put my source in it: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 547611
Slashdot editors, please put it in the story?
My photo's.
This is nothing more than a shot across Microsoft's bow. They are warning them that they are ready to make a big play in open source and also have managed to basically, buy the hearts and minds of nearly every single FOSS developer for merely $2million - an absolute bargain.
Google still isn't that open source friendly. Sure, they use Linux for servers but that's simply because there is little competition in the market for 100,000 PC 'clusters' with zero license fees.
Where is Google Desktop Search for Linux? Where is an official Google Talk client for Linux (yes, I know about Jabber, but it doesn't integrate with your gmail contact list)? Where is the Gmail notifier for Linux?
Until that changes, I don't really think that you can consider Google anything more than an open source user, not a contributor.
Finally, Google knows that open source is a huge catalyst. For the $5,000/student they paid it would of probably cost Microsoft $50,000+ to do the same work. That basically means that for every million dollars Google puts in, they cost Microsoft $10million. It's a bit like the CIA funding the mujahadeen to fight the soviets, it probably cost them $1 to inflict $10,000 worth of damage onto the soviet economy (eg a $10,000 stinger missile launcher taking down a $10,000,000 helicopter).
The "pencils down" for Google's Summer of Code was September 1st.
If I'm not mistaken, all major BSD's (Free, Open, and Net) support a feature called 'soft updates'. Basically, re-ordering filesystem updates in such a way, that the filesystem remains in a consistent state, even in the event of a badly-timed crash or powerout. All this to avoid the need for a full fsck on reboot.
Quote from the FreeBSD features page: "Soft Updates allows improved filesystem performance without sacrificing safety and reliability. It analyzes meta-data filesystem operations to avoid having to perform all of those operations synchronously. Instead, it maintains internal state about pending meta-data operations and uses this information to cache meta-data, rewrite meta-data operations to combine subsequent operations on the same files, and reorder meta-data operations so that they may be processed more efficiently. Features such as background filesystem checking and file system snapshots are built on the consistency and performance foundations of soft updates."
From the NetBSD site: "Soft Updates permit metadata writes to be ordered to achieve close to asynchronous disk performance without risk of metadata corruption. This significantly improves the performance of FFS file systems."
You might still do a full fsck later (as regular maintenance), perhaps even as background task, but it wouldn't be needed for a reliable restart.
Journaling is another way to do this, by adding an extra 'log' of the latest updates to a filesystem. Then in the event of a crash, you don't need to check the entire filesystem, but can bring it back into a consistent state by 'replaying' those latest updates from the journal.
Now here's what I don't understand: why add journalling to a filesystem, when you're already updating it in a 'crash-proof' manner (soft updates)? What's the point? Seems rather like a step back to me, with soft updates looking like a smarter way to archieve crash-proof filesystem handling.
I assume that this soft updates feature is limited to certain OS/filesystem combo's. And maybe journaling provides some thing(s) that soft updates doesn't? Can some knowledgable BSD user shed some light on all this?
-- This sig just wasted another 0.x seconds of your precious time. Supporting banning sigs!Tsync is a Summer of Code project. Looks cool...
The "event" has lasted all Summer. Why not publish at least status of the projects?
Because Google didn't know the status of the projects, at least not for the 400 projects not mentored by Google. That was the whole idea of having mentoring organizations: Google didn't have the resources to look after each of the 400+ students. However some students, and some mentoring organizations have made the status available to anybody (for example by spliting everything into tiny tasks and tracking them using JIRA) but nobody was forced to do so. Two months is very little time to finish a project, and most of the chosen projects were very ambitious. So my guess is that rather then providing status on the progress for the rest of the world, the students and mentors focused on developing software.
Why are you so sure the projects can be found, that Google will make the announcement?
I'm just guessing. It just makes sense that when you invest so much money into sponsoring projects you will want the world to know that you did so, and that many of them were successful. Google could gain some more press coverage because of this. But I think that this was not the goal of the whole thing, and they might even skip it. I'm very currious about what they could tell, so I really hope they won't.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
- Hubert
sorry but MS still is the highest worth tech company @ 284.42 Billion Market Cap...
google = 84.56 Billion
Firefox bittorrent (firepuddle):
http://firepuddle.mozdev.org/
Here are SOC projects done for Blender,
m merOfCode2005
http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/Su
We had some really awesome projects happen (fluid simulation, high quality boolean tools, improved nurbs, 'Verse network integration, animation constraints improvements, and a drawing tool, alas two projects - ODE integration, and a live tutorial didn't happen).
LetterRip
For those who are curious, the Perl Foundation had 8 Summer of Code projects funded. They were a blast to work with.
Summer of Code: Mentoring Organization Faq:
Q: Does the code have to become part of a mentoring organizations mainstream codebase?
A: No, While we hope the code will be useful to the mentoring organization, we will not require that the code be used.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Yeah, for a $2 million dollar project it was ridiculously understaffed on the Google side. But Googlers like Chris DiBona and Greg Stein worked extraordinarily hard to keep things flowing relatively smoothly. So it still turned out to be a huge success for Nmap and most/all of the other participating projects. Thanks, Chris and Greg!
So what did we (Nmap project) accomplish in those two months? The sponsored students and their credentials/projects are listed here. Much of their work can be found in Nmap 3.90, which was released on Thursday. SoC changes include:
It has been a crazy two months, but I'm very pleased to see so much accomplished! If you're using an older version of Nmap, you really should consider upgrading to 3.90 to see the difference.
Cheers,
Fyodor
If you weren't aware, a list of the SVN projects is here:
http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2005-06/0975.shtml
You can find more on the status of the projects in the Subversion dev list archives. I believe David Anderson's "Path-based authorization for svnserve" project was completed. I haven't really been watching the rest of the SVN SoC projects.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
I think the flexibility that came with the SoC counts for a lot. Numerically, the SoC was a fairly significant pay-cut for me. I would have made almost 3x as much if I had taken my regular summer job (60 hour work-weeks add up quite quickly...). On the other hand, with the SoC, I had a lot of flexibility in my schedule, and more importantly, I was able to choose my own project. That in and of itself is worth the difference, at least for one summer. Let's face it --- it's very hard to get paid working on Lisp :) While I do like my regular job, as well as my major, I doubt I'm the only one who has tangential interests that they would love to persue, but often cannot due to lack of time or money. The SoC, while it might not pay like my regular job, made persuing such projects much more palatable.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...