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Summer of Code'08 Organizations List Announced
kulbirsaini writes "Google has announced the list of accepted organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2008. 'No doubt many would-be Summer of Code students are wondering what their next steps should be. We've changed the program timeline this year, leaving a week in between the announcement of accepted mentoring organizations and opening for student applications. Use this week to meet your potential mentors and discuss your project ideas with them, and keep on eye on the program mailing lists, as we'll post notes about additional resources for learning about our mentoring organizations.'"
Please take a look at our ideas list and let us know (summer-of-code@gnu.org) if you have any questions.
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In the FWIW dept: I spent several hours this afternoon monitoring the #gsoc forum. Kudos to lh for taking the time to critique the rejectees, I'm sure it was not easy.
It's apparent that the main criteria used to determine who gets a mentor org slot is (1) the size of the organization, (2) whether an org participated in years past, and (3) the quality of the ideas list. (Yes, all three criteria were confirmed at one point or another during the afternoon.) By my count, more than half of the 2008 mentoring orgs participated in 2007. When asked how this can possibly inject innovation and new ideas into the OSS community, one Google staffer replied that it's all about the students, and larger orgs can mentor more students than can smaller orgs. As for the ideas list: We were rejected on a technicality in that we didn't specify the *difficulty level* for each idea in our list.
So what did I come away with? A process that rewards organizations that seem to already have the resources necessary to attract new developers, and a process that falls back on technicalities to determine, in part, who makes the short list and who doesn't.
As one Google sysop replied rather testily to someone, "it's *our* money, so we can do what we want." Don't know if I'll waste my time again next year, since we will only be able to surmount just one of the three most heavily-weighted criteria. But at least now, we have a good idea of what the selection process entails.
Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.
The following game projects have been accepted,
The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.
This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).
Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.
One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.
The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a ruleset editor which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the future.
As well, the Open Source Office funded one student in a Summer of Code style outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope the code will soon be rolled out.
Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage with educational instit
Thousand Parsec - http://www.thousandparsec.net/
The Nmap Security Scanner project has now participated in Summer of Code all three years—and mentored 25 students. So I'm pleased that Google has accepted us for a fourth year. This really is a great program, so I hope many Slashdotters apply (or at least spread the word to your student friends who may be too busy with school to read Slashdot). There aren't many opportunities available to get paid to work on free software of your choice. Your work makes a big difference for projects and their users as well. You can read about the successful Nmap SoC students in 2007, 2006, and 2005. No Nmap user can read those lists without recognizing features and improvements they use.
Of course part of the purpose of this post is to shamelessly plug the Nmap SoC ideas page for people trying to choose a project. We'd love to have you. But honestly, I recommend applying for multiple projects if you really want to get in. Don't just spam a bunch of crappy boilerplate applications, but submit as many carefully-considered ones as you have time to write. Also, I've written up some tips for preparing a great SoC application.
-Fyodor
No DnD 4th edition. Considering the game's release is in a couple months, I suppose that's a good thing. But I couldn't help but assume Wizards is going to wind up putting something together in the last few seconds like they did with the 3.0 character generator.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Dojo is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. It allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more useable, responsive, and functional.
So, thats what we do - and we're involved with the Summer of Code for the third time in 2008. And this summer we have lots of exciting stuff planned: charting, accessibility, visualizations, automated testing, 3d graphics, ... or suggest your own.
- Rob :)
Prospective gsoc student participants interested in improving Free Software Desktop Publishing are invited to look at Scribus Team's ideas list at http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Ideas. We are starting our second GSoC year and are looking for good student coders to improve the *nix/MacOX/Win32 Desktop Layout Software. Come in to #scribus on Freenode if you'd like to talk to us or join our mailing list at http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus. We are open and quite friendly.
Alex
Scribus Team's GSoC Administrator
You should be encouraging programmer to do physical exercise, not code more!
BRL-CAD is delighted to be participating in the Google Summer of Code this year for the first time. Be sure to check out our ideas list and either stop by the #brlcad IRC channel on Freenode or subscribe to our developer's mailing list to get involved early.
As many know, computer-aided design (CAD) is one of the areas most lacking attention in open source. BRL-CAD has a solid foundation and considerable 25-year development history with more than 450 person-years development effort invested yet we are still wholesomely lacking in the usability and user-interface department. Maybe some of you can help us fix that. We're interested in many other ideas as well. Hope to see you apply!
Cheers!
Sean
Through the Videolan project, x264 is accepting SoC applications this year. We don't have many mentors though... so the competition will be tough!
Drop by #x264dev on Freenode and get involved in the qualification tasks before its too late... more information can be found here.
There are plenty of people outside Redmond who still hate Google.
Some people are upset with the recent Google-Youtube-China situation. It's obviously not entirely Google's fault, but it's not a comfortable situation.
Lots of people think that Google has serious privacy problems. Not everyone thinks these are limited to its own data collection either--sometimes Google knows too much.
Some people think Google mis-manages its Adsense platform and hurts small publishers.
And lots of people are upset about PageRank -- from those who get a zero PR for no clear reason, to sites that get dropped, to anti-hate groups that dislike it when pro-hate groups get high rankings.
I don't know if any of those are GOOD reasons to hate Google, but plenty of people DO.
I see that many people have posted information about their projects etc., and for those who have done so, how much experience would I need to apply? I am interested in applying for a project but unfortunately I have not really worked with open source code before and will only have taken about a year of programming (Java/C++) at the university. What do people think is typical knowledge necessary for working on a Summer of Code project? (Sorry if this looks like spam, but I feel this is a serious question for the other half of interested people.)
I wear two hats, so let me shamelessly plug both projects I'm on: Wine is in its fourth glorious year of the Summer of Code already ( http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode/PreviousProjects ) and each year has been fantastic. See our ideas page is at http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode Wine is going to hit 1.0 this summer, it's an exciting time to be involved. Zumastor (a project to add better snapshots and remote replication to Linux) is overjoyed to be participating in Summer of Code for the first time this year. See our ideas page at http://zumastor.org/soc.html or our home page at http://zumastor.org/ I look forward to working with y'all.
> It's apparent that the main criteria used to determine who gets a mentor org slot is (1) the size of the organization, (2) whether an org participated in years past, and (3) the quality of the ideas list. (Yes, all three criteria were confirmed at one point or another during the afternoon.)
That is not my experience at all.
The Comprehensive C Archive Network org (a port of CPAN to C) was accepted, despite it being essentially only two or three main people (mostly Rusty Russel and I) with a mailing list and an irc channel, and only existing for 3-4 months.
So we apparently got through on the strength of our idea alone.
All those things I think are really weak arguments. I don't encourage any one to like|love|adore any company. But as far as reasons go to dislike a company, these are pretty weak ones -- for me at least.
Issue 1 : Google follows local law. It concerns me a lot more when companies think they are above local law.
Issue 2 and Issue 3: people make (and have) too much personal data available online (as far as I know Google is mining private DBs and making that data available). I am far more worried about the fact that advertisers seem to get my new addresses as soon as I connect up utilities.
Issue 4: Google screwed me on Adwords too.. which reminds me I need to remove it from my site... done! (thanks for reminding me to do that). I never got a dime from years of having their ads on my site. Adsense/Adwords is poorly managed. I suggest people drop their accounts if they don't like it. I don't hate them because of it, I strongly dislike and will not use their Adwords/Adsense service.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I'm stoked that Sahana - a project to develop a FOSS web-based system for disaster management has been selected again for GSOC. Thanks Goggle!
If you're interested in working on a system that will help ease suffering and save lives during and after a disaster, then consider contributing to the Sahana project. It was started after the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Sri Lanka and it now into our fourth year, and I think third GSOC year.
Some areas we're focusing hard on this year are incorporating social networking for disaster response, and implementing a more comprehensive GIS. We would welcome other suggestions.
Sahana@GSOC, Sahana GSOC ideas. If you want to discuss it more, join up to the Sahana maindev list on sf.net.
If you want to contribute to an humanitarian project for a change, Sahana may be the project for you. Of course, we've got plenty of technical opportunities as well ;)
"I'd venture a guess that there is some very advanced networking code in use at Google"
"networking code"? They use the stock Linux network stack just like the rest of us (actually a pretty old version of it on most of their machines), and I'm kind of baffled that you'd think that networking code is where Google would be doing interesting work. Networking is a solved problem. It's what you do with the network that interesting, and where Google is spending their money and time.
But, since you haven't bothered to actually, you know...look at their Open Source projects website, I'll mention that Google does have a reasonable stable of open source projects that they've released...a million lines or so of it, apparently. http://code.google.com/hosting/projects.html
They are heavy users of MySQL, and I know that they've paid for quite a bit of MySQL development work. And they employ too many OSS project developers to count.
Take your GPL defensiveness somewhere where it's useful. Google is a pretty good member of the OSS community...you wouldn't want us to start demanding that you start working on Open Source projects right away just because you use gThumb to organize your porn, would you?
THat's quite ironic - an anti-hate group hating Google :-)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It's more than that, it is also elitist, they are only paying university students.
Of course, since a big goal of the programs is to engage university students, complaining about the fact that the program engages university students is pretty much insane. Next, you should take on those bastards at your local grade schools, I bet they wouldn't welcome your dad into their classes as a student.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Question and answer. My 'porn'...? I suppose you just rolled off of Heidi Klum in order to make that post. Why do the research when you can get a more thorough answer through a discussion board in fifteen minutes and get berated at the same time? Seriously!
The point was that running some C code on your computer and displaying the result through javascript doesn't seem different than installing an active-X control to run the same C code (if it's something the client can easily handle). The former case doesn't seem to require open sourcing the modifications, and it is a pretty big loophole. So Google never takes advantage of this. Sounds a little naive to me, but other companies surely are.
I was absolutely thrilled that RTEMS was accepted this year for the first time. As others have said, we also were not a mentoring organization in the past, so they must have evaluated the project and ideas page. We have already have some students pipe up on our mailing list and I really look forward to having some students accepted and working with them. I asked one question on the SOC google group and have lurked there. The google folks seemed to bend over backwards answering questions. Thanks.
The gEDA project was accepted again this year (second year we are participating). We are quite thrilled and grateful to Google for the opportunity! We are looking for students who are interested in working on free software and electronic circuit design software.
Here is gEDA's GSoC 2008 page as well as the suggested projects page. You can also look at gEDA's homepage for more info on the project in general.
-Ales (gEDA/gaf developer)