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Google Summer of Code Announces Mentor Projects
mithro writes "As everyone should already know, Google is running the Summer of Code again this year. For those who don't know, GSoC is where Google funds student's to participate in Open Source projects and has been running for 5 years, bringing together over 2600 students and 2500 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide. Google has just announced the projects which will be mentor organizations this year. It includes a great list of Open Source projects from a wide range of different genres, include content management systems, compilers, many programming languages and even a bunch of games!"
Looking at the site, I noticed that Ubuntu has a list of projects to work on which are mostly from the Brainstorm site. Most of the other projects have no such plan. I think this is what puts Ubuntu ahead of so many other open source projects.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Supposedly last year's GSoC helped a great deal with FFmpeg, Pidgin, and Rockbox, among others.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
I participated twice so far, applying again this year just because I enjoy it.
My mentoring experience was very uneven. One mentor was very good, the other very crap. I completed my projects for both without a hitch, but the time without a good mentor was much more difficult.
It's a little bit of a crapshoot. You're more likely to get in if you target smaller groups, but you're more likely to get good support if you target larger groups. YMMV.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Yup - Wine has had quite a bit of success with these projects. Here's a link:
We have all sorts of people apply to work on our SoC projects. The most successful SoC projects are ones where the student already has active involvement in the community and has already committed patches.
----- obSig
OpenMRS benefited from last year's SoC, and is on the list this year, too. Millions of people around the world are getting health care that's assisted by OpenMRS.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
student's
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Uh...I knew how to program pretty much cold when I went in. I started when I was very young, though, so it's a little more natural to me than some folks.
Whatever language you choose, you'd better be good at it. Your mentors will help you with project requirements, etc. if you get selected (and you should be hanging out in their IRC chats, talking with them, figuring out what they want to do, and getting your name in their minds), but they will expect you to be a solid programmer who doesn't need to be hand-held.
I don't really recommend any groups in particular. For example, the Drupal guys seem way nice (not a group I've worked for, but one I'll be applying to this year), but generally expect some solid community interaction beforehand. WinLibre is a group that's kind of really dysfunctional, with only one or two people involved--who also happen to be your mentors; that was the organization I had the worst time with. Nice guys, not the right kind of org for GSoC.
You're best off scattergunning a lot of quality applications to a lot of groups. My first year, I applied to 12, and got accepted for my favorite one. My second year, I applied to 3, and got accepted to two of them (one I knew was an acceptance, so that was foregone and I wasn't worried about getting too many apps in). This year, I don't have such a guaranteed project lying around, so I'll be going with as many quality applications as I can manage.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."