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

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: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: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?

[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!

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?

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.

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.