Summer of Code Org Application Deadline Approaches

chrisd writes "Just wanted to drop a line reminding open source projects that they only have until March 12th (Pacific time) to apply for Google's Summer of Code. We are accepting more organizations this year than last because we want to add a couple hundred more students to the program. If you are part of a great project or know someone who is, we'd love to see an application. Please note that this is for organizations and not for prospective students, that's not for a few more weeks (see the program timeline)!"

Comments

Google redeems itself

[CRCulver]

For me it's always inexplicable that Google is held up as an company sympathetic to Free Software when their own products, such as Google Earth, remain closed. Still, we should be grateful that they do something useful for the community every summer by sponsoring projects where people can actually see and adapt the code produced.

Re:Google redeems itself

[yurivr]

Perhaps it is because it is not the right time to open source their core products. You can commend them on at least being cross-platform, which is a damned good start. When products such as google earth start facing more competition then FOSS may be in the books.

Re:Google redeems itself

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a recruitment/marketing tool. We have nothing to be grateful for.

Re:Google redeems itself

[yurivr]

There is no shortage of people rushing to work for google. Regardless, is it not clear that people who could care less about google will benefit from the source code this generates? You will find alot of this code implemented one way or the other in modern *NIX distributions. A smart, "everybody that's not a bastard wins" move.

Re:Google redeems itself

[cheater512]

You need to check out http://code.google.com/more/ some time.

They open source a *massive* quantity of their code and APIs.

Re:Google redeems itself

[moosesocks]

I imagine that Google Earth, for instance, has all sorts of licensing issues attached to it, given that Google doesn't own much of the imagery being used.

They're no saints, but they seem to put forth a good effort, which is a heck of a lot more than you can say about most corporations.

Re:Google redeems itself

[Rick Bentley]

There are indeed all kinds of license issues attached with the mapping. The underlying mapping data isn't owned by Google, they license it from its respective owners. I think that NAVTEQ is their biggest supplier of street level data, DigitalGlobe supplies most of their satellite imagery, and DeCarta supplies the platform that puts the data in a "geo-spacial database" and supports the queries for things like reverse geo-code (put in a street address and get a location on a map). I assume there are others in the food-chain too, especially for overseas maps.

A typical license agreement with these content/platform providers is some kind of minimum commitment and a "per map draw" cost. If Google fully "opened up" their platform, under their licenses, then they'd have to pay every time someone else's application drew a map (even if Google never got any of the advertising revenue associated with that map draw). That's a little more generous than we can ask anyone to be.

I guess we could ask Google to open the platform to those who wanted to license the map data with each respective party themselves, but just that level of negotiation, minimum commitment, etc., is beyond the run of the mill mashup's budgets and available effort. I do think that you can get so many draws from Google for your application for cheap to free, but when you hit a certain amount they ask you to pony-up -- which is actually a nice business integration effort that they provide to developers.

newbie suitable

[X0563511]

I've been seeing lots of stuff about this SoC... is this intended for students who already know how to program? I'm not a programming student, and I really don't know too much - is this program something I would want to look into?

Re:newbie suitable

[nategoose]

It is for students that know how to program well, and from looking at some of the projects from past years a lot of them are pretty good at getting things done. I admire their ability to step into a new project like that and make real non-trivial contributions in a relatively short amount of time.

Re:newbie suitable

[Enleth]

IF you can't code, you'd better not take up the coding tasks - but there are tasks that require other skills, too. Of particular use is documentation writing, something that OSS programmers often dismiss as unimportant and boring or just because they don't have the "feel" for writing decent manuals. If you can express complicated ideas in a simple way, explain them clearly and make sense out of contorted processes in general, try your skills in this area, it certainly will help some user as much as a new feature in his favourite application.

Re:newbie suitable

[X0563511]

I can program, I'm just not experienced or trained. It's exciting and not boring - it's challanging - but it's not like "oh golly gee! I get to program today! Wee!" That leads me to think that programming is not going to be something I'll be good at primarily. Writing documentation though... that might be something I can do!

Have to look into that... thanks.

Re:newbie suitable

[68kmac]

Writing documentation though... that might be something I can do!

Unfortunately, that's not something that's covered by the Summer of Code (documentation does not count as code), as much as many open source projects would welcome that.

Try finding an open source project you care about and help them with their documentation. I'm sure they'd be grateful.

Does SoC end with a best code contest?

[damn_registrars]

We could call it "Code of Summer" - perhaps to see which open source project made the most progress over the summer with their SoC help?

suggested projects: Open source voting systems

[goombah99]

Open source voting (see for example Open voting consortium) could use some devoted polishing and completion. Given the design principles are well worked out so that show stopping pitfalls will be avoided, it's due for some proper craftsmanship.

A person working on this could have worldwide lasting impact.

another project might be a YAML C++ library and the equivalent of XSLT for YAML.

Re:suggested projects: Open source voting systems

[snoyberg]

another project might be a YAML C++ library and the equivalent of XSLT for YAML.

That seems a little under-ambitious. Here's a little wrapper around the parser end of libyaml (which, if I remember correctly, was also a SoC project): http://git.snoyman.com/cppweb.git?a=blob;f=src/cppmodels/yaml.hpp;h=e67377c792309a51eb5a4c9dac05ba89befd38d6;hb=HEAD.

Re:suggested projects: Open source voting systems

[goombah99]

Hey thanks for the wrapper class. That will be handy. What yaml needs is a speed up and an XSLT.

Working Application Code - What to do with it?

[c0d3r]

I have a working application that I implemented with hopes of getting VC and selling the product, but that's seemed to become an impossibility for an unknown, hence I'm inclined donate the application to the Open Source world. I wonder if this would be a good channel for opening my applications. Its not that I want to make money on them, I just want my code to "live". Right now they're in the state of "a really good working prototype". Then again, i'm an engineer, not a business man or lawyer (can you say GPL?). I've created presentations below.. one is a visual XML ide and the other is a job site data mining application.

http://tty.wanfear.com/~mbrito/Content/HTML/Job%20Intelligence%20Demo/index.html
http://tty.wanfear.com/~mbrito/Content/HTML/VXD%20Demo/index.html

I've got tons of other stuff like this, but don't know what to do with it. Any suggestions or directions anyone?

How many SoC "news" do we have to get?

[microbee]

So we had an early heads-up one month ago, and then an announcement less than 2 weeks ago.

What's next? Do we need a cron job to submit the same Google news every other week now? Or can we get SOME valuable news here?

Re:How many SoC "news" do we have to get?

[Enleth]

I don't know where did this notion of /. front page space being a scarce resource come from, but I really don't think that NOT submitting some stories will cause a spontaneous apperarance of "valuable" (however you define that in the scope of your own interests) news in the submission system. Or will it?

Submit something yourself, maybe?

Re:How many SoC "news" do we have to get?

[microbee]

I submitted my fair share of news, and got my fair share of rejections too.

Yes, I do think the front page is a scarce resource. The more crap is put there, the less valuable news is there. And just to clarify, it's the editor's fault other than the submitters.

I thought it was obvious, no?

Cron job?

[iknownuttin]

Do we need a cron job to submit the same Google news every other week now?

"cron" job? I thought it was a "ZONK" job?

Wait, let me google ZONK......trying GNU ZONK ....hmmmmm....Holy Shit! It's..he's...she's a person?!?

Re:Cron job?

[tylerni7]

http://www.l.google.com/search?q=gnu+zonk So wait... when you googled GNU ZONK, did you just get your own post from the future?

Why not be grateful?

[bigsmoke]

Why? Are you not supposed to be grateful for anything that anyone does (partly) in their own interest?

Anyway, just wanted an opportunity to say that, as a frequent user of free software, I myself am very grateful for these annual contributions to the open source community.

Re:Does anyone really give a rat's ass?

[RiotingPacifist]

do you even know what the SoC is? it has nothing to do with Google Office, they program for pretty much any OSS project that will take them, lame or interesting.

Darn it, posted in the wrong window

[melted]

I do. I was commenting on another site about Open Office.

Google Earth?

[sentientbrendan]

So, you're complaining that a software company that gives away it's software and services for free, doesn't also give away it's code for free? Remind me to never give you a Christmas present.

Do you know what the phrase "undeserved sense of entitlement" means?

gee, thanks for the reminder!

[pedantic bore]

... but I thought this site was for discussing
news, not reminding us of things.

Oh, wait, it's a story about Google. My bad.
Let's rehash this again. All hail Google!

Re:gee, thanks for the reminder!

[Breakfast Pants]

chrisd used to work at Slashdot, now he works at Google. It was just a favor.

What worries me about these projects

[sentientbrendan]

is that the students go away after the code is submitted, when a large software project really needs someone who understands the code to stick around and maintain it.

I've seen a lot of summer of code projects that look really cool, but then you never see the feature ending up in the final product.

I think the summer of code thing is a good idea in that it gets students involved in the open source community, but I hope that the projects spend some time thinking about who will maintain the code after the kid is back in school, and I suspect that doesn't happen.

Re:What worries me about these projects

[68kmac]

Well, one of the questions on the signup form is

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

So Google does encourage the organisations to think about that problem in advance, too.

salary

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they would up the amount of money they give students: $4,500 for the summer. It's just not competitive. Compare to Microsoft which pays their interns $15,000+, plus a bunch of perks.

Re:salary

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an internship (I'm sure Google internships are comparable). Just to balance that out though:
1) You get to work on _your_ pet project
2) no bosses really (mentoring is not the same thing)
3) no office hours (depends on project of course)
4) work anywhere you want

From last years experience I can tell you that finishing the project was hard work, but mostly lots of fun. it was also pretty nice to wake up in the morning, see that it's going to be a beautiful day and just set jabber status to "out in the sun, bbl"... I don't think you should do that as a Microsoft intern if you want to get paid.