Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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/
...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.
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!
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.
.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.
Gladex is a Python application which takes a
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
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?
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.
Please help metamoderate.
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
Psst. code.google.com works for everyone.
Some people will bitch about anything and everything I guess.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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?