Slashdot Mirror
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."
I dont know why they didnt liked my confiker worm :(
I am so pleased that I have an extra pair of hands over the summer.
my liqbase project was one proposal out of 10 selected for the maemo.org community.
we are building applications for the nokia internet tablet device.
obviously I should show off what I'm building ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXp0Dg_UaY
liqbase
I was accepted to work on a Windows package manager called WinLibre for GSoC 2009. I can't wait! You can read about it here: http://www.excid3.com/2009/04/20/accepted-into-google-summer-of-code-2009/
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.
According to the article: "Eight Australians and five Kiwis have made the cut for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, announced today."
Should Aussies and Kiwis be eligible for "summer of code"? It seems to me that they should only be able to enter the "winter of code" contest if it takes place during June through August.
Major kudos to Google for continuing to run the Summer of Code despite the hard economic times where most of silicon valley is cutting way back. Those 1000 students and 150+ open source communities represent more than a 5 million dollar investment this summer, which is not petty cash or an insignificant investment for *any* organization. The raw horsepower of the program itself (roughly and easily) represents more than 400 years of development "staff-years" going into open source software just over this summer with much more coming from those that stay involved with the open source communities and continue to contribute. Very cool.
It's a great symbiotic relationship. Google gets major attention, which is of course very important to their business model. The open source orgs get passionate and motivated developers, many that stay long after GSoC. The students get the experience of a lifetime, an introduction into a life-long relationship with open source and their ability to directly make a difference.
Cheers!
Sean
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.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
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
Were the BSDs not involved in GSoC this year?
Did you even look at the list?
DragonflyBSD: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/dragonflybsd/
FreeBSD: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/freebsd/
NetBSD: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/netbsd/
interesting idea, not everyone's a coder after all.
Perhaps an Autumn of Documentation, followed by a Winter of Marketing, and a Spring of Sales.
Think how much goodness could be spread by some of the above!
Why is this a useful paradigm these days? How many of these stupid slideshows have I clicked on, just to read something that could have been contained on a single non-scrolling web page?
It isn't. Web 2.0 is shit. Seriously. For every cool app (e.g. Google Streetview) or cool mashup there are tens of thousands of arduous, information obfuscating, time wasting and soul destroying websites that do nothing other than get in the way of what you're trying to do (e.g. book airline tickets) or trying to discover, while spamming you with useless graphics, animations, advertising, and generally teaching your eye to ignore almost everything displayed in your browser...and then hiding the bit of info you're looking for in the area of the screen your eye has trained itself to skip over because of so many ads previously.
Someone needs to develop a browser (or proxy) that downloads a web 2.0 site, disassembles the logic, deconstructs the page, and reconstructs it as a simple HTML page (with forms if necessary) so those of us not interested in spending our hours wading through visual SPAM can get something useful done before the sun expands into a red giant and envelops the Earth.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Google SoC Projects per Capita:
United States: 0.69 ppm
India: 0.09 ppm
Germany: 0.67 ppm
Canada: 1.31 ppm
Brazil: 0.22 ppm
PPM = projects per million. Figure the U.S. benefits from Google being a U.S. company, and by the fact that English is the native language. Canada would also benefit in that respect. But if that's the case then where's the U.K.? Germany suffers from not having English as the native language, but then again, open source in general is probably more popular in Europe than in the U.S.