Google Announces Summer of Code 2008

morrison writes "The 2008 Google Summer of Code is on. We have discussed this four-year-old tradition before (2005, 2006, 2007). Google will once again be hosting a program that gives computer science students a $4,500 stipend to work on open source software projects. Last year, Google funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries. As noted in the program FAQ, this year they hope to do even more. The #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode is already buzzing with activity."

Comments

What should get precedence?

[calebt3]

Insert worthy projects below here.
I personally hope Blender gets work.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Breakfast Pants]

Obama needs some tweaks.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Blender has had some major changes thanks to the previous SoCs. I don't expect anything less this time around.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fix the Firefox memory leak! No wait, something more realistic... how's about world peace?

Re:What should get precedence?

[Nimey]

The anti-ballistic-chair defense system. Google's going to need it some day.

Re:What should get precedence?

[smittyoneeach]

Emacs, though thought by some to be older than the Renaissance, could enter one...

Regarding the Obama ad served on this page: "It's a cookbook!!!"

Re:What should get precedence?

[mithro]

Thousand Parsec (a game framework for turn based strategy games) was one of the mentor organisations last year.

The effect on our project was really huge, not only did the students do some very cool work. We now have the creditability to approach Universities and help get their students involved with our project.

We already have one student working on Thousand Parsec as part of a high school internship and two students from the University of South Australia working on a Java MIDP client.

Thanks a huge amount to Google and the Summer of Code team, hopefully we can get in again this year and have even more fun!

Re:What should get precedence?

[asterix404]

Naw I want to develop a file system that will effectively deal with with massive files >4GB and all hook up to a distributed file system spanning over 9000 computers...

Re:What should get precedence?

[Matt Perry]

The anti-ballistic-chair defense system. Google's going to need it some day.

I'm surprised that Microsoft doesn't star their own "Summer of Code" considering how they keep saying that developers are so important.

Re:What should get precedence?

[larry bagina]

they already have winter, spring, and fall. MS allows free (as in no cost, not five finger discount) downloads of all their programming/OS/Server software at my uni. (This is something MS "donated", they aren't getting paid for it).

Re:What should get precedence?

[dgarbett]

My vote is for a linux blue-ray player.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Enderandrew]

This is a bit of an urban legend at this point.

1 - Any complex app will likely have some memory leaks. The code has been very thoroughly examined and cleaned up for Firefox 3.
2 - Most "leaks" come from poorly written extensions/add-ons. Run without them and check out the difference.
3 - There is a feature in Firefox that you can easily turn off, that people mistake for a memory leak. Firefox keeps fully rendered versions of pages in memory, in addition to the standard cache on the hard disk. If you hit back, Firefox doesn't need to re-render the page. Browse a while, and Firefox will use up plenty of memory. If you don't like this behavior, then turn the feature off.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised that Microsoft doesn't star their own "Summer of Code" considering how they keep saying that developers are so important. To work on what - open source projects?

Don't Microsoft already take plenty of interns?

Re:What should get precedence?

[Matt Perry]

they already have winter, spring, and fall. MS allows free (as in no cost, not five finger discount) downloads of all their programming/OS/Server software at my uni. (This is something MS "donated", they aren't getting paid for it).

It isn't about donating software. Software is cheap. Those same students can get free operating systems and development software that's non-Microsoft too. What Google is doing is donating the organizational skills to help students. They get to work on something that's larger than just a small personal project. They learn how to work within a larger team structure that may have established rules for code style, structure, documentation, etc. Most importantly, they are assigned a mentor who can help them navigate this new environment and help them to become better programmers. The financial reward isn't bad either. Microsoft isn't doing anything like that.

Re:What should get precedence?

[calebt3]

You mean codecs and drivers?

Re:What should get precedence?

[Anonymous Coward]

What Google is doing is donating the organizational skills to help students. How much organisation does Google donate itself? Isn't it actually the volunteer mentors from the open source projects involved that do the work? Doesn't Google just stump up some cash?

Microsoft isn't doing anything like that. Wouldn't Microsoft interns get mentored?

Re:What should get precedence?

[Neil Hodges]

Yes, I can vouch that interns at Microsoft do get mentored. My only experience was from their high school internship program, mind you.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a bit of an urban legend at this point.

1 - Any complex app will likely have some memory leaks. The code has been very thoroughly examined and cleaned up for Firefox 3.
2 - Most "leaks" come from poorly written extensions/add-ons. Run without them and check out the difference.
3 - There is a feature in Firefox that you can easily turn off, that people mistake for a memory leak. Firefox keeps fully rendered versions of pages in memory, in addition to the standard cache on the hard disk. If you hit back, Firefox doesn't need to re-render the page. Browse a while, and Firefox will use up plenty of memory. If you don't like this behavior, then turn the feature off. Saying that would have been even more useful if you'd included directions as to how to turn off this "feature".

Re:What should get precedence?

[jesser]

Why? For most users, having fast (and accurate!) back/forward is more useful than having Firefox allocate less RAM. The feature even automatically turns itself off if you don't have a lot of physical RAM.

Turning off bfcache might be useful for rudimentary leak detection, but a proper leak-detection tool is less likely to be confused by fragmentation, other caches, or the OS simply not reclaiming memory that the application has relinquished.

Re:What should get precedence?

[NotBorg]

Developers, developers, developers

Re:What should get precedence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this affect the 57% ram X uses after i have surfed heavily and exited firefox?

Re:What should get precedence?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Most "leaks" come from poorly written extensions/add-ons.

Isn't Firefox supposed to be a bare-bones browser that requires tons of addons in order to be useful? This is what I hear every time I criticize Firefox for being so useless in its out-of-the-box state. Defective by design?

Re:What should get precedence?

[richlv]

i'd expect the mentoring-of-the-mentors, the management of applications, the distribution of cash (remember how many different countries with the most weird laws they have to deal with !) would need quite a lot of work.
of course, the details of the coding are in the hands of project leads, but i don't think anybody ever expects a different situation at that level :)

Re:What should get precedence?

[Enderandrew]

What feature does Firefox lack out of the box that others provide? Mouse gestures?

People keep saying they want Firefox small and fast, and now you're complaining about modularity?

Re:What should get precedence?

[krazytekn0]

Hey, how can I get on board helping with Thousand Parsec? I'm a sophomore level CS student (currently learning on my own while saving money to continue school) I've done most of my programming in C and C++.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this affect the 57% ram X uses after i have surfed heavily and exited firefox?

You're an idiot. Memory usage (even when 'leaked') don't remain after the process is closed. That's just not possible. So if you actually really do have a memory leak (as opposed to the operating system just caching stuff as you use the computer. Good OS's will always use as much memory as you make available), it's something else you have running, not firefox.

Re:What should get precedence?

[mysqlrocks]

Obama could use the Nader upgrade: Obama-Nader '08

Re:What should get precedence?

[mithro]

It's great to see people interested in Thousand Parsec. There are quite a few ways to get involved in the project.

As part of the process of applying for the Summer of Code, we have started putting together an ideas list. We also have a TODO tracker on SourceForge which listed various tasks. There is also Getting Started page and development environment setup HOWTO's.

I would recommend joining the mailing lists and joining us on IRC [irc://irc.freenode.net/#tp]. We are happy to help you interactively find interesting things to work on. We have also started a "Who's Who" page to help you track down the right person.

Most importantly, find something you are interested in! If you are interested in AI, then working on an AI client is a good idea. Like most FOSS, none of us are getting paid (unless you are lucky enough to be part of SoC :), hence doing something you like is important!

If you want to pursue the possibility of getting course credit for your work, I recommend finding a course councillor or senior lecturer who can help you to try and figure it out. We are happy answer their questions, fill out various paperwork and do other support tasks.

As you have skills in C++ maybe looking at the C++ components like the C++ server, KDE C++ client and the C++ protocol library could also be a good start.

Look forward to seeing you around!

Re:What should get precedence?

[Mandrake]

actually, that is not true. in fact, X allocates pixmaps for drawing to the screen most of what you're displaying in firefox - many of which are in subwindows of the main firefox application. X is allocating memory for the application, in other words. if not freed properly (due to, say, potential bugs in this person's X server) this can, in fact, cause memory to leak that lasts beyond the termination of the actual application (firefox).

4th year in a row?

[Breakfast Pants]

My open source Visual Basic extension for Word 97 has been rejected 3 times already; I'm gonna try one last time.

Re:4th year in a row?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine has been rejected 3 times too, though it is a FSF High Priority Free Software Project :
"Develop a free compatible client for Google Earth". If someone has an explanation...

Kids have it lucky these days

[PhrostyMcByte]

Granted pretty much nobody in high school will write quality code (even if they honestly think they do, like I once did), the chance to get paid experience and a mentor to help you improve is fantastic.

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[calebt3]

This isn't high school. It's CS students.

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[Deltaspectre]

Summer of Code is college level :)

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[redalien]

Actually, Google Highly Open Participation contest produced some excellent pieces of code that were all submitted by "high school" students. If I didn't know better I'd say they were professional developers.

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[LetterRip]

Granted pretty much nobody in high school will write quality code (even if they honestly think they do, like I once did), the chance to get paid experience and a mentor to help you improve is fantastic.

Actually Nick Bishop who did SoC with Blender 2 years ago, and with Inkscape (I think?) last year, had pretty good code quality already as a high school student.

LetterRip

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[Anonymous Coward]

It's college students, but not necessarily all CS majors.

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[Anonymous Coward]

very yes. at my university, there's such a program for students of business engeneering.
Instead of tests, lectures, etc. you code a program for a local company. they paid for prett much everything, a complete office (nobody actually works there, it's rented just for this program) with highspeed internet, stuff like a CSV-Server and two mentors.
Honestly, I have no idea why. These programs coded are usually quite... erm... buggy, so they don't give out really crucial programs to write. And if they looked for good programmers, I'd rather go to the departement of computer science.
For the students however, it's quite a good thing. You actually learn what you can do with programming and in a way more practical way than in the normal course, looks good in the resumee, you are likely to be offered a job and you pretty much automatically get an A grade without every writing a test.
Bad thing: Out of 600 students, 9 are accepted in the program.

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[Corsix]

While you are correct about many people in high school, some can write high quality code, as shown in the Google Highly Open Participation contest. With the Drupal project, there is a 12 y/o who is too young even for GHOP who writes very good code. Corsix -- GHOP Drupal grand prize winner

Not So Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate them or not, you can't argue that isn't a good thing.

OpenMoko, coreboot, and ATI video drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

GO!

Too bad I get paid too much and actually have a real job. I'm being serious, it would be awesome to do a summer of code.

Re:OpenMoko, coreboot, and ATI video drivers

[CSMatt]

Agreed. I really need new ATI drivers. Neither the free drivers nor fglrx will allow me to suspend my laptop.

Re:OpenMoko, coreboot, and ATI video drivers

[bled]

Google already has Android (with competitions, etc.).
Why should they support an OpenMoko project?

Metascore sure needs developers

[Anonymous Coward]

The development team is meeting for the first time in March. It is a rather ambitious project, but the code itself seems like it would be simple.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/metascore/

Re:Metascore sure needs developers

[Anonymous Coward]

The development team is meeting for the first time in March. It is a rather ambitious project, but the code itself seems like it would be simple. I'm struggling to see what it actually is. All the Sourceforge page says is it's the software to run MetaGovernment, and the web site reads as if it's one of those pretend-to-be-the-United-Nations games they play at college? There's no actual real government involved, it's all discussion and pretend?

Re:Metascore sure needs developers

[Neil Hodges]

If you'd like to run a real government, I'm sure you'd be able to find some land on an island in international waters or Antarctica. Followers, however, take a bit more work.

Re:Metascore sure needs developers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretend until it becomes real. Like wikipedia started out as pretty much a pretend encyclopedia.

With a system like Metascore, you can run a whole community government without having any leaders. Once a community has a robust set of Metasocre-generated laws, they can simply change their constitution to use the website as the government, and get rid of the traditional government.

Re:Metascore sure needs developers

[Anonymous Coward]

No followers. No leaders. The whole point of online government is that EVERYONE can participate as much or as little as they please.

MonoDevelop

[free space]

I'm a Windows developer who's gradually moving to Linux and I use MD more and more as time passes,I believe it's an important strategic tool for helping programmers switch to Linux. It needs lots of work, though.
I'd mentor someone myself for some of these tasks, if I were related to the project as anything more than "user" :(

YAML c++ library

[goombah99]

YAML needs a c++ implementation and could use something like XML style sheets to make it the complete replacement for XML.

Re:YAML c++ library

[nuzak]

YAML needs a bullet to the head, it's such an ad-hoc goofy format that makes wikitext look rigorous. Or perhaps just a subset that isn't barkingly insane. Like JSON, perhaps.

write a decent reporting tool

[timmarhy]

a database intergrated reporting tool like ms reporting services, but without the crap limitations and odd behaviour, would be awesome.

without it OSS in business still has a big FAIL stamped on it's forehead.

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[Chandon Seldon]

without it OSS in business still has a big FAIL stamped on it's forehead.

What you really mean to say is that, without this specific tool, you'd have to change some of your business processes in order to use different software. The funny thing is that it's a different tool for each person who makes this complaint.

It's perfectly possible to use FOSS to support running pretty much any business. The only real exception is where the business itself is to produce data in proprietary file formats - i.e. acting as a graphics design consultant is frequently the job of creating photoshop files rather than graphics design. But database reporting doesn't fall into that category; not even close.

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[timmarhy]

I've worked in many industries and without fail they all have a requirement for automated generation of reports based on database information.

reporting sevrices provides a really good tool for this, and OSS has no answer to it. it'd be nice if there was one.

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[Anonymous Coward]

But database reporting doesn't fall into that category; not even close. OK, but just because it could be achieved by open source doesn't mean it has. So where are the good FOSS database reporting tools then?

Isn't that what Summer of Code is about - making useful achievements things in FOSS?

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real exception is where the business itself is to produce data in proprietary file formats - i.e. acting as a graphics design consultant is frequently the job of creating photoshop files rather than graphics design. But database reporting doesn't fall into that category; not even close. O RLY? Everyone I set up database reporting for wants export to Excel.

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[DNS-and-BIND]

No way, man! Do you know how boring that would be to develop? What we really need is transparency and alpha channel blending effects. And skins! There is a serious dearth of quality skins for mplayer!

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[nschubach]

Sad, but true. Instead of telling you what reports they need, they want to manipulate the numbers/charts to make their department look better.

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[DragonWriter]

I've worked in many industries and without fail they all have a requirement for automated generation of reports based on database information.
reporting sevrices provides a really good tool for this, and OSS has no answer to it.

There are quite a lot of OSS database reporting tools (or generic reporting tools that can be used with databases and other information sources). What specific features do you think business needs that are not provided by any of the existing open source reporting tools?

Re:write a decent reporting tool

[fredzouille]

I don't know MS Reporting Services, so I don't know if they are on par with it, but there are several free reporting tools available already, like BIRT, JasperReports, iReport, OpenReports, Pentaho, SpagoBI, etc. Did you have a look at them ?

One good project

[Anonymous Coward]

On good project would be preventing these FUCKING POP-UP ADDS on Slashdot.

Re:One good project

[childprey]

Problem exists between keyboard and chair.

Re:One good project

[Solder Fumes]

More like, problem exists between front and back covers of wallet.

My hope...

[bogaboga]

...is that enough resources get geared to having KDE 4.1 as complete as can possibly be. Guys, KDE 4 rocks and can be made better. Go guys.

Re:My hope...

[Carewolf]

KDE 4.1 is scheduled for a release before summer. KDE 4.2 is more likely to benefit from SoC.

Re:My hope...

[neumayr]

It does not "rock". Not in any conceivable sense of the word.
It may, at some point in the future (I'd guess in around 2 or 3 years), when some of the stuff they dreamed up actually gets implemented, but not now.

Awesome

[katterjohn]

I successfully participated last summer working with Nmap. Leslie (from Google) and Fyodor were wonderful to work with, and I hope I can get in again this year!

Great job, Google!

Re:Awesome

[dgarbett]

Naaw, they should get more strippers in.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Great Oppurtunity for IT enthusiasts!

Check out Gladex

[charlie763]

I don't think we'd make it into GSoC, but if you are into Python and Glade you should checkout Gladex. We're even a Featured Project on Launchpad.net! Gladex isn't in the Ubuntu or Debian repositories yet, but we do have a PPA going of an alpha release. Alternatively, you can download the stable packages directly.

Gladex is a Python application which takes a .glade file created in the Glade User Interface Builder and generates code in Perl, Python, or Ruby. The generated code uses libglade to draw a GUI and is not raw pygtk code (support via a plugin is in development). Support for additional languages can be added through the plugin API.

Re:Check out Gladex

[AlXtreme]

Looks interesting, but one question that I couldn't find on the site: Why generate code at all?

I might be missing something, but libglade has a python wrapper (and probably Ruby/Perl too, I'm too lazy to check). You can connect signals and handle events, everything you can do with generated or self-written GTK+ code. Calling libglade in Python is about 4 LOC. Why would anyone need a generator for this?

Again, I'm not trolling here, just curious and both an avid GTK+ and Python user.

Re:Check out Gladex

[ricegf]

You can connect signals and handle events, everything you can do with generated or self-written GTK+ code.

The one very important thing you can do with generated code that you can't do with a 4-line call to libglade is customize the code. A library can't do everything custom code can do, though good libraries seem to cover 80-90% of the most common use cases. For many applications, the libraries do everything you need. For everything else, you'd like to generate the commonplace code from your glade design and then customize the small portions that are unique.

Re:Check out Gladex

[TeacherOfHeroes]

For many applications, the libraries do everything you need. For everything else, you'd like to generate the commonplace code from your glade design and then customize the small portions that are unique.

I agree, there are some things that UI builders are not that good at. AFAIK, though, you can access the various elements of the UI through the GladeXML object that is returned when you load a .glade file. Why not just use the glade library to load the glade file, then use GladeXML's get_widget command to retrieve various elements that you want to customize.

Maybe I'm missing simething, but what kind of modifications you can make when you have the source code that you can't make otherwise? Or is it more an ease-of-midification idea?

Re:Check out Gladex

[ricegf]

what kind of modifications you can make when you have the source code that you can't make otherwise?

I'm not certain that Python can't create any arbitrary GUI out of a .glade file - certainly, Python's incredible flexibility has surprised me before. :-)

However, when I'm creating a GUI dynamically based on a configuration file (for example), taking a basic framework of code generated by a GUI designer and modifying it to be dynamically tailored is more direct that trying to learn the details of the GUI designer's internals to create the same effect.

Here's where I'd love to show you a really great example, and I almost have one. I've been playing with the design of a high-end screenshot utility - something with the power of (say) SnagIt or ScreenHunter, but for Linux desktops. I laid out the design so that plug-ins could be sequenced by a "power" user in a graphical flow to be used as single-click capture profiles for "normal" users. So, data could be sequenced from image sources (e.g., grab a region of the screen, the contents of a scrolling window, or even the time as a transparent image) to image transforms (e.g., content-based crop, merge images, scale or rotate) to image destinations (e.g., a file, website, printer or email).

I laid out several possible UIs in Glade, but kept hitting dead ends in terms of generality. My Glade-based UIs always included some limits to make the UI-based UI design process more manageable. As we agreed, if I were more clever I could probably find a way to remove those barriers with clever code that interacted with the Glade libraries, but in the end I've concluded the most direct approach is to generate the UI as I interpret the plug-in configuration.

Probably not the best example, but the best I have. :-)

So maybe it's a theoretical vs. practical distinction. Theoretically we could build a defense system with a billion lines of code, but practically we're not smart enough yet to build a workable system of that magnitude. And I'm not smart enough to implement a really general, end-user configurable UI using Glade. YSMV (Your Smartness May Vary). ;-)

Have ANY projects been completed and integrated?

[batkiwi]

I know from looking the last 2 years that the projects for both PSI and MythTV were accepted and started but never completed to a point where the maintainers put code into the full product.

Are there ANY success stories?

t-shirts

[Greenisus]

will they offer t-shirts to people who don't participate this time? i've been out of college for a while, but i love the Summer of Code shirts....

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[katterjohn]

Are there ANY success stories?

Absolutely. My fellow SoC students and I participating with Nmap last year have lots of code in Nmap proper. And the years before that (Nmap has participated every year of the SoC) there were a whole lot of cool things added to Nmap proper from SoC work.

computer science students?

[radarsat1]

This isn't limited to computer science students. From the FAQ: "Computer Science does not need to be your field of study in order to participate in the program."

For example, my program of study is Music Technology, where we have lots of students working on audio-related software projects, and many which become contributions to open source. It's a graduate program, so we have lots of students who came from other disciplines in a previous life, many which were CS, but not all. One student last year wrote an extention to Audacity for more easily tagging parts of audio files, for example. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure if he ever contributed the patch.. I'll have to bug him about it.. ;-)

Anyways, just to say, not everyone who can code is filed under Computer Science, even though that's what we do.

Re:computer science students?

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

> This isn't limited to computer science students.

Quite true, but why do Google restrict participation to students?

The first goal listed on their SoC FAQ is:

``Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all''

So why exclude professional developers who could crank out code?

I would dearly like to take a two-month sabbatical from work and
concentrate solely on writing code. There are huge voids in the
provision of free astronomical tools that could be addressed. But
finances dictate otherwise.

Instead, vast swathes of time and money will be wasted as students
learn about version control, rediscover elementary mistakes and
become entrapped in the politics of open source.

Thanks for nothing, Google.

Re:computer science students?

[nuzak]

Psst. code.google.com works for everyone.

Some people will bitch about anything and everything I guess.

Re:computer science students?

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

> code.google.com works for everyone.

There is no $4500 stipend to cover my sabbatical whilst I concentrate
on improving the lot of the World.

So it doesn't work for me.

Re:computer science students?

[Anonymous Coward]

Waaaaaahhhh!!!

Small Winner and Big Winner

[webword]

Google = big winner
Intern = small winner

Even when you add the small winners together, Google still wins. Lot's of outstanding brainpower for dirt cheap.

I guess everyone wins if the interns like the cash and see it as a resume builder, right?

Re:Small Winner and Big Winner

[Anonymous Coward]

Google = big winner
Intern = small winner

Even when you add the small winners together, Google still wins. Why? Google don't directly benefit from the work you do on miscellaneous open source projects.

Lot's of outstanding brainpower for dirt cheap. How do we know they're outstanding? All you need to do is write something that interests a project maintainer. It's not like there's face-to-face interviews.

Re:Small Winner and Big Winner

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's DIRECT benefit from the code produced isn't that great for non-Google projects...

Re:Small Winner and Big Winner

[Nazlfrag]

Even when you add the small winners together, Google still wins. Lot's of outstanding brainpower for dirt cheap. You're right, but it's not only brainpower Googles getting. The publicity itself would be worth the money, with the headhunting opportunities a distant second.

Linux telepresence software

[jfenwick]

I feel like one way that Microsoft is really gaining ground in business is with integrated telepresence software like Communicator, and increased multiuser input into Powerpoint. If Google really wants to help the Unix platform make a comeback for the average business worker, they need to fund someone to create this software.

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Blender?

Have ANY projects actually been useful?

[SuperBanana]

MythTV? You're joking, right?

More importantly, are they going to work on anything actually *useful*, instead of sexy stupid stuff that is the 2008 equivalent of "skinning" mp3 players? Every time I heard about SoC participants, I noticed that a)it wasn't something really useful or important and b)the main development team was really lazy about integrating in the work the student had done.

A great example of where some SoC lovin' would be great: Netatalk *blows*. It doesn't handle sleeping clients that try to reconnect, and they've sat on their fucking hands for YEARS with the whole openssl/GNU licensing debacle. It's still impossible for any distribution to distribute netatalk with SSL support compiled in (Debian and Ubuntu being two big examples.) Leopard now *requires* encrypted password support- you get an immediate error if the server doesn't support it (rightfully so.)

And no, Samba isn't an acceptable alternative. It vastly underperforms versus AFP on the same hardware/network, and doesn't support a lot of functionality Macintosh programs require- Quickbooks, for example, won't open a quickbooks file on a SMB/CIFS server.

If one or two Summer of Code students sat down and worked on improving netatalk, they'd be instantly loved by many the world over. I dare say that netatalk would do well from (another) code split; they haven't done a release in over TWO YEARS.

Re:Have ANY projects actually been useful?

[batkiwi]

MythTV is the only reason 3 people I personally know run linux. How is sharing files with an obsolete protocol any more worthy?

Sometimes, not all that great

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen some amazing things come out of GSOC, but things that I've been interested in wind up half-assed, not documented, poorly documented, would only work on the developer's machine, missing something needed to compile, leaves the actual implementation as an exercise for the consumer, or some combination of the above. In that respect, it is a lot like real code done by anyone else! ;p

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[jesser]

I believe Firefox 3's implementations of resumable downloads and the APNG image format came from GSoC participants. The continued support of MathML in Firefox 3 may also be due in part to the work of a GSoC participant. We've also had a few not-so-successful GSoC projects.

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[PenGun]

Na. They can't even get google earth to play nice with gpsd. Just folded proprietary GPS crap into the windose version and left it at that.

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[IBBoard]

There are apparently several SoC changes in Pidgin (formerly Gaim)

Google Announces Summer Of Love 2008

[LecheryJesus]

Microsoft responds with its own 'Free Love' initiative. The highlight of the event will be a 'developers' conference, featuring Ballmer in an 'easy access' rear-zippered gimp suit.

LJ

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[richlv]

quite a lot, actually.
i've only followed the ones in projects i am interested in, and there hve been some very nice finished features (as well as some disappointing failures).

a quick estimate on things i paid attention to, some 3/4 to 4/5 of projects were completed succesfully. remaining either delivered less than promised or failed completely (student just disappearing...).

the enlightenment project

[saturn_vk]

I hope the enlightenment project will be accepted this time around. They provide very nice libraries, though it was a shame that they were rejected in previous instalments of SoC

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[Fweeky]

Quite a few FreeBSD SoC projects make it into the system or ports, or at least had some of their work help with it; a quick glance at the SoC wiki pages I see enhancements to libalias and ipfw (I think some of this eventually made it; we now have kernel NAT with ipfw), bsnmpd bridge monitoring, FUSE port, gvinum enhancements, GEOM storage virtualisation, Apple hardware support enhancements, and what became the name service caching daemon.

Other things may not have made it in, but were good research projects both for the project and for the students; FreeBSD now has a very functional port of OpenBSD's hardware sensors suite, though it wasn't accepted into base because of architectural concerns. gjournal started life as a SoC project, and while rejected it did help spur development of a new more functional one, and the student went on to produce gvirstor, the aforementioned GEOM storage virtualisation layer which *did* make it. The Linux KVM port got far enough to boot FreeBSD 7 as a guest and will hopefully continue development. I'm sure I've left lots out.

Just because a SoC project doesn't make it into a "product", doesn't mean that project wasn't a success. Even if it never produces something deployable, it's given a student some experience in development, it's given the project some interesting if not necessarily immediately useful code and it's helped lay groundwork for future development, even if it only does so by providing those concerned some experience.

M$ could do the same

[someone1234]

But they will never support truly open source projects.
They will just support their own 'open source' definition.

Four year old?

[Trivial_Zeros]

Sorry to be pedantic, but this being the start of it's 4th year of competition, it would now be three years old. After all it was not one year old during the first year of competition, was it? Computer geeks should know better than committing such an obvious off-by-one error.

Quick introduction for those thinking of applying

[morrison]

BZFlag participated in the Google Summer of Code for the first time in 2007. Our participation was documented in this detailed article (Warning: 15 MB PDF).

Another higher-level summary was put together for a presentation and is available here (Warning: 5 MB PDF)

See the presentation for the quick introduction. I highly recommend the article to any students and projects/mentors that are seriously thinking about participating for the first time.

On the whole, it's a great opportunity for projects but you do have to put in a lot of time and effort. You have to have your act together. If you do, the students and the projects will both have a great time.

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[chx1975]

The unit testing framework / automation for Drupal that Google sponsored through three SoC and then a huge number of tests were written during GHOP. One GSoC 2005 student is now is one of the biggest contributors to our project. Yay for GSoC!

Great opportunity !

[Anonymous Coward]

I am with Bjarne on this one.
Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, claims that C++ is experiencing a revival and
that there is a backlash against newer programming languages such as Java and C#. "C++ is bigger than ever.
There are more than three million C++ programmers. Everywhere I look there has been an uprising
- more and more projects are using C++. A lot of teaching was going to Java, but more are teaching C++ again.
There has been a backlash.", said Stroustrup.

Video Editor For Linux, For Reals

[Anonymous Coward]

May I suggest the Diva project (see gnomefiles.org) or some other application for video editing?

Seriously now, Linux needs a good video editor, and I'm not talking about SinOrElla, with an interface that looks like someone threw up on a car's dashboard (yes, I heard there was a recent fork, any progress with that?).

We need a good video editing app on Linux, I've tried them all and none is an all-around general purpose good video editor, they all have problems and many of them crash or freeze or just act weird and none get the job done at all, unless you're using one for a special reason like Kino for DV.

Linux needs a good video editor, Google could deliver this, I believe. What say you, Google?

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there ANY success stories?

The ffmpeg project has a list of things that were done as part of GSoC.

Unfortunately, there is also a long list of things that were never completed.

Learning is not a waste of time

[Per Abrahamsen]

vast swathes of time and money will be wasted as students learn I really doubt that the Google consider the time and money wasted that they spend on student learning, especially when they, as you point out, learn the social and technical tools for collaborating on free software. Here are the rest of the stated Google goals:

# Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development
# Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers;
# Provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer (think "flip bits, not burgers");
# Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette).