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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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mod this -1 troll, please
i have nothing to say, but my parents never taught me that if you have nothing nice to say, don't say nothing at all, so here i am trolling /. so mod me -1 troll.
Is it possible to hate Google (besides Monkey Boy Balmer)? I really can't think of one negative thing about them, I really love them. Larry/Sergey for 2008!
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!
I thought I saw LNUX somewhere but I cannot find it on the list. Are you guys there?
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
Ubuntu is noticeably absent from the list. Why? Because nobody ever even bothered to apply. I guess the community was too busy censuring enthusiastic but uninformed volunteers and writing brainstorm from scratch to bother picking up 5k for the organization, money for developers or new features.
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.
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.
Hypocrites: not a single Google application is open source: Google Picasa, Google Earth, Google Desktop, etc... are all *CLOSED SOURCE* -- Friends of open source... hmmm, I don't think so. HYPOCRITES
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 ;)
The spirit of the GPL is to give back when you make use of the code, right? Since google might use GPL'd code internally they aren't required to disclose their source code modifications to anyone outside, but do they anyway?
I'd venture a guess that there is some very advanced networking code in use at Google, and it was perhaps even built open sourced code! Will the improvements be distributed to the original authors who were nice enough to lay the foundation and give it away? The law may not require the release, but the 'spirit' of the GPL demands it.
VA Linux: Toilet slave. If you like scat, watersports, felching, perl, and scat, you'll love us! Room and board provided.
My father, of 78 years, has in the previous three years, embraced Linux and Python. He is retired and has much time on his hands. And for someone who has been just a user for many a year, I find that the code emitted by this three-year old programmer to be both elegant and practical.
He runs the network for his church, and volunteers as a DBA for several charities
And I bet that you twenty-something Summer of Code managers would not give an old fart the reading from your Rolex.
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)