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Summer of Code 2006 is On
chrisd writes "The Summer of Code is officially on again this year. As of today, we're taking in applications from mentoring organizations, so watch that list of mentoring organizations grow! Then, starting May 1st, we'll start taking student applications.
We've prepared two FAQs, one for Mentors and one for Students. We've also have created an IRC channel and Google Group for you. The website for the Summer of Code can be found at http://code.google.com/soc/."
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Do they really need a contest to keep nerds a pasty white/translucent color? It's not like summer was going to get anyone out of the basement. ;)
~S
You have years of 'summers of code' ahead - at your job. Try something else while you have the chance.
Yes, but those summers of coding will be heavily deadline driven and for projects one probably doesn't want to work on that much. Whereas a 'Summer of Code' is more about working on something of personal interest and learning. It's more a workshop than a day-job.
http://code.google.com/soc-results.html
Miguel de Icaza, founder of the Mono project, made a blog post yesterday about the state of the SoC projects for Mono : http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Apr-13.html
/ 03/summer_of_code_six_months_on.html
11 projects out of 16 were continued, 6 students still being involved in Mono today.
The Mozilla project had far less chance : None of the 10 projects are alive as of today : http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006
I guess they'll be more carefull about the motivations of the people the choose this year...
What are you talking about? SOC participants get paid $4500.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I realize that the program is called Summer of _Code_, but I think a lot of open source projects could benefit just as much from dedicated QA or documentation work. I mean, I've seen a lot more people complain about gaim's instability than its lack of a "music messaging" feature =P.
Summer of code:
- Working on something you enjoy
- Possibility of getting 4500 USD personally and 500 USD for your favourite OSS project
- Doing something that will benefit at least one person somewhere else in the world, if not many thousands.
- Practice for future job probably
- Something reasonably unique to put on CV
McDonalds
- Boring, hot, horrid job
- Shit money
- Further perpetuating the problem of obesity and heart problems by providing overweight middle aged men and women and their kids, for whom they can't be bothered to cook a nutritious meal, with their daily dose of fatty dead animal
- Time spent doing repetitive tasks that require no skill or thought
- Just another generic teenage job to put on your CV, if mentioned at all
Oh well, there's always next year.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
So before you call the Summer of Code a failure, question what the student workers _learned_ instead of how many stable releases they built.
...please take a look at my little piece on grading proposals Summer of Code 2005 written after the students who made it were selected.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
No offense, but if you think Windows (or Mac or Amiga or whatever) needs more representations, then I suggest you tell those CS students using Windows and open source developers for Windows to participate!
Better yet, tell the Windows open source projects to offer to be mentors, and tell the CS students to apply. Heck, the two groups might even match up!
Personally, I think the SoC 2005 participants included a great number of platform-agnostic projects. Web apps like Drupal, Gallery, XWiki, Java projects, Perl, Python (all multi-platform groups...) Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice... the list seems pretty good to me. Heck, even WinLibre (free software for Windows) was represented.
But by all means, if you think there need to be more participation from groups X, Y, and Z then I think you better tell them to sign up ASAP!
Happened to work with one of the products of last "Summer of Code" (no fingerpointing). Raw, unfinished, bad coding, no docs. Ended up delegating it to one of my friends in one of the 3rd world country. He wrote it from scratch in 4 weeks for $300.
I guess the value of "Summer of Code" is mostly educational.
What will GOOG do to stop the same outright shambles this time round?
The page you linked to says nothing about outright shambles. He specifically says "I don't want this post to be seen as bashing either SoCcers or mentors". The page offers some excellent comments and suggestions for 2006, and I'm glad to see that Google is listening (Chris responded in the comments). Some of the suggestions are also meant for us mentors. The Nmap project is proud to have been invited to participate in SoC again for 2006, and we are looking forward to it!
You can call it "outright shambles" if you want, but all the emails I have from participants talking about how much they learned and enjoyed the program speak otherwise. And was it valuable to the Nmap project too? Take a look at their efforts and decide for yourself:
They did much more -- these are just some of the highlights. So I, for one, am looking forward to continuing these outright shambles again this year! But at the same time, there is always room for improvements . So I appreciate Gerv's constructive criticism.
-Fyodor
If you're going to do CS, don't even bother listening to this guy. You get out of University, and all the job offers are asking for experience. I don't think they mean experience in McDonalds. Summer of Code is a way to make a quick buck, doing something fun and challenging that will look hella good on a CV or application. I don't see any negative points except for the effort required...
im in ur