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Highlights From the 2009 Google Summer of Code

mask.of.sanity writes "Over a 1000 students were accepted into the fifth year of the program from 70 countries and will work on about 150 open source projects with mentor organisations. The program, created in 2005, has exposed some 2500 students to "real-world" software development and opened employment opportunities within mentor organisations and in fields relevant to their academic study. The United States scored the lion's share with 212 accepted students; 101 from India; 55 from Germany; 44 from Canada, 43 from Brazil. The Dominican Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg and Nigeria were new entrants to the program each with a single accepted student. Check out the slideshow summary of some project highlights, with hyperlinks back the detailed project pages."

10 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Will be "mentoring" two participants. by Hero+Zzyzzx · · Score: 4, Informative

    A few basic definitions to make this post clearer:
    participant: student accepted into the program
    sponsoring organization: pretty obvious one, the organization sponsoring the participants
    mentor: the person from the sponsoring organization delegated to manage GSoC participants

    I'm pretty psyched. I've got two students to mentor on two different projects - I think it's going to be a great summer.

    GSoC is a brilliant program on google's part - they are transparent about their aims: to get the "sponsors" to evaluate the participants so google can think about hiring them.

    Google avoids headhunter fees, gets an in-depth real-world evaluation with a significant codebase to review and open-source projects get quality work.

    Google may still pwn my datas, but hey: this is clearly not evil.

  2. [PASTE] / The stupidity of a slideshow w/ icons... by Khopesh · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's right, all this for 14 giant-size icons on 14 pages of ads and other garbage to read the 14 sentences of text that contain all the important info.

    Or I could paste them here.

    • Linux Foundation: The architecture of the OpenPrinting web-service will be overhauled to alleviate resource consumption, OpenJDK will become LSB compliant, and setting-up an access point will become easier in Linux under some of the 11 projects run for the Linux Foundation.
    • Mozilla Project: The Mozilla Project has 10 initiatives for the program this year, including automated duplicate detection for Bugzilla; integration of pre-existing, third-party extensibility into Ubiquity; and improvements to the Register Allocator of Trace Monkey.
    • OpenSUSE: Nine projects will be sponsored by OpenSUSE including porting from openSUSE to ARM; an implementation of the YaST education module; synchronisation with mobile devices; and porting openSUSE to MIPS.
    • Drupal: Drupal will receive a peer review platform for its forum, and API integration for Google Analytics under 18 sponsored projects for the Summer of Code this year. Others include: completion of version control integration and deployment to Drupal.org; a usability testing suite; and plans to 'make Drupal smart'.
    • KDE: KDE will sponsor 38 projects including: improving search and virtual folders in KDE4; plasma media center components; a crossplatform authentication and authorisation framework; weather support and enhanced plugin features for Marble; and finishing the Amorok playlist with multilevel playlist sorting.
    • Debian: Integration with the Amazon EC2 cloud service; automatic debug package creation and handling; and rewriting the Debian autobuilding infrastructure are all part of Debian's 11 projects accepted in this year's Google Summer of Code.
    • Apache Software Foundation: The Apache Software Foundation will sponsor 38 projects including: adaptive query targeting in distributed database environment; a Java debugger command line tool; Web-based management console for ServiceMix; a new user interface for the Apache Qpid JMX management console; and empowering Google Android applications to easily consume business services.
    • GIMP: An advanced GUI for brush dynamics and an improved nonlinear resampler with built-in antialiasing are some of the 6 projects sponsored by the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Other initiatives include a "fast adaptive resampler tailored for transformations which mostly downsample", and some improvements to the foreground selection tool.
    • GIT: GIT will get 2 projects this year, which will add caching support to git-daemon, and an interactive graph GUI.
    • GNOME: The GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME) will sponsor 25 projects that will make conduits work as a daemon; integrate bugzilla into pulse; add support for Nautilus to Google docs; allow GNOME-Sudoku to be played with IM contacts; and improving the DVB experience with GNOME DVB daemon.
    • Joomla!: Eighteen projects are being sponsored by Joomla! in the program this year. Error handling will be improved; a common gateway will be added f
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  3. Re:Thanks Google by Burkin · · Score: 3, Informative

    epresent more than a 5 million dollar investment this summer, which is not petty cash or an insignificant investment for *any* organization.

    It is a petty amount when your total cash on hand is 17 billion dollars.

  4. Overview for BRL-CAD by morrison · · Score: 2, Informative

    Thought I'd share a basic summary of our student's projects for this year that are working on BRL-CAD. We accepted five students.

    • One student is working on a new GUI. Make BRL-CAD's graphical interface suck less and be more awesome. This is a major project that will take a long time, but GSoC has been helping us get there in a big way.
    • Another is implementing support for new primitives, sweeps and solids of revolution, complete with ray-tracing support. That modeling flexibility greatly increases the complexity of shapes that can be easily represented and more efficiently modeled.
    • Yet another is working on constraints and parametric equation support. This will let modelers define objects that can more easily be articulated while still "keeping everything together". Model an object so that it's always be tangent to a surface, for example.
    • One fairly advanced project involves performing constructive solid geometry (CSG) operations on boundary representation objects. With this implemented, BRL-CAD can get away from it's present wireframe display and support interactive OpenGL shaded geometry.
    • The last student will be working on setting up a fantastic resource for the open source community, an on-line website dedicated to free (as in beer and freedom) "open source" solid geometry models. Unlike many of the existing "free" sites, this repository will specifically focus on relatively unrestricted reuse ala OSI / FSF criteria and will use BRL-CAD tools on the back-end to provide automatic file format conversions, renderings, and more.

    GSoC really has shown to be a fantastic opportunity for both open source communities and students, getting smart motivated passionate people working together on improving open source software and growing those communities. The program has an impressive ability to motivate and organize open source groups, helping them "get their act together" in many respects. While it's highly competitive with many organizations and students that will get left out, it's no more so than most graduate programs. There are similar short-term rewards and even greater long-term potential. To top it off, even if you don't "get in", you can still contribute! Some of our best new developers were students that were rejected in a previous year but then became involved and were better prepared next year.

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    Cheers!
    Sean
  5. Re:Glad to See GIMP is Participating by jcupitt65 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't know why you picked that one out. It will add a feature that visibly improves the quality of all image shrinks, past what Photoshop can do out of the box. It's a really useful, basic improvement.

    Read about it here if you're curious:

    http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode2009ideas#head-ee0a4959625baa7bff3da72ec494b0f5f10859dd

  6. Re:BSD no where to be found? by Burkin · · Score: 3, Informative
  7. Re:[PASTE] / The stupidity of a slideshow w/ icons by rilian4 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I know nmap has some projects in GSoC as well but I didn't see them listed in the slideshow. Any others that didn't make the show?

    --

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  8. Re:Thanks Google by GrAfFiT · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have to disagree on that one. The Google Summer of Code is basically run by 5 people from the Open Source Programs Office. There's no one from HR involved.

    Google has absolutely no control over who gets selected. The orgs alone choose their students. The only feedback that Google gets from the Summer of Code projects are two routinely hurriedly written reports from the orgs at mid-term and end of project.

    Finally, of those that successfully complete the Summer of Code, less than 1% end up as Google interns and even less as full-time engineers.

  9. Re:today's interesting but useless metric: by orudge · · Score: 3, Informative

    Aha, a bit more hunting around and here we go: more statistics than you could shake a stick at.

  10. Re:Offtopic question by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 2, Informative

    the closest to what you are asking is documented here:
    http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Maemo_roadmap/Fremantle

    however we have not yet seen a physical device

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