Slashdot Mirror
Google Names Winners For Summer of Code 2011
akgraner writes "Google has announced the accepted projects list for its 2011 Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Program. Ryan Rix emailed the Fedora announce mailing list to let users know Fedora was one of the projects that had been selected, while Daniel Holbach informed Ubuntu users via his blog that Ubuntu had not been selected."
Red Hat has a lot more money no?
There's a great variety of projects in there. Everything from serious academic theorem provers to even more serious things like helping people play Monkey Island
They should write some code to help defeat the Great Firewall of China.
I see Gnome got accepted. Now maybe they can finally afford to add minimize and maximize to the Gnome 3 shell.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
169 other open source projects were accepted into the google summer of code 2011. http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2011
what a stupid way to present this. Please may we have a repost which clarifies this???
I would like to see projects that would specifically improve the Android experience for users.
As we all might now know, Android 3.0 got the not-so-appealing label as one OS that by interpretation, was born a bit early. Projects that could address this prematurity would be welcome for Android.
Ubuntu is famous for making Linux xfree86 more like windows which moved Linux progression backwards, attracted a bunch of pseudo techies, and promoted development of clicky-clicky applications. I am glad to see respectable distributions like Debian make the list. FreeBSD is also an excellent operating system.
Not trying to start a troll war but is there any particular reason why Ubuntu was omitted. There seems to be far too many slots open (not that it's a bad thing), why can't they have squeezed in one more?
Daniel Holbach's blog post doesn't say much. To be sure, all my favorite apps (!store) are represented, including Blender, Abiword, Scribus, GnuCash, and VLC (as Videolan). Aside from Fedora, other distros represented include Debian, OpenSuSa, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and NetBSD (but not OpenBSD unless my eyes have deceived me).
If you are a talented coder who has an interested in graphics; simulation; animation; painting; video editing; digital compositing; game engines; AI; or just about anything else related to 3D animation; video editing and compositing; or games you might consider applying for Blender.
Here is a preliminary list of ideas, we are open to suggestions (in general only half of the proposals we recieve are items on the list) especially if it is something that you worked on for a school project.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php?title=Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2011/Ideas
As an always sceptical individual, I am inclined to ask whether all past Summers of Code have been fruitful or have produced good helpful outcomes.
To be convinced, I'd like some dude to point me to specific results that past Summers of Code have yielded...My hope is to see useful tangible results. I anxiously await. Thanks.
I can't speak for other projects, but I think Rockbox (a digital audio player firmware) got some good work done last year. I built a new parser for their theme language and a graphical theme editor that's got some regular users. Another student successfully ported Rockbox to Android as an app. I'm sure other projects saw success as well.
Surely some fraction of the participants have been happy with the money that they received.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There is a list of some past projects that students have worked on, get your hand out of your pants and search for it. GSOC seems like a great experience for students (I wanted to apply this year, but I'll have to wait until next year as I enrolled in some summer classes :( ).
Here is what blender got done in 2009.
http://www.blendernation.com/2009/04/21/blender-google-summer-of-code-2009/
What the fuck? "To see the contents of this list you should enable Javascript." Well fuck no! I don't trust you evil Google, and so I don't enable JS for you!
A simple table, or list, and it requires JavaScript? That's fucked up. Progressive enhancement, or graceful degradation (whichever one of these you prefer) is essential to providing an accessible, usable, and useful web. Two different design philosophies, that amount, in this case, to the same thing. If the browser is not JavaScript aware, capable, or has it turned off, the browser should still be able to access the information!
Anyway, from the first link, I can see that AbiWord, a great, fast, and cross-platform word processor, is on the list. I use it all the time, 'cause it opens up so much faster than OOo.
(On the list, some kind soul pasted it too: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=tmw4JCFU. Though it's in CSV format.)
I can see from the list, that DokuWiki, DragonFly BSD, Freenet, LibreOffice, MoinMoin (another wiki system...) and QEMU also got listed. There are a lot of other good projects there too. I don't use most of the projects, but knowing they are there, is good.
Appended to the end of comments you post. The maximum is 120 characters.
Let me introduce to to this thing Tim came up with...
Like...is not this last Friday's news?? Is /. slipping into a time-reality offset from our own?
-><- no
What! no PC-BSD but all the other BSD flavours got in? No fair I say!
incredibly useful. This is hands down the most easy way for us (JavaPathfinder) to get interns funded, and students are generally very motivated. For example, from GSoC'10 we got an interactive debugger interface for the model checker ala gdb - serious stuff. The most valuable thing for us is to learn about new talent. We even hired some of them subsequently, which was much better to justify on the basis of successful GSoC projects.
They have winners before even taking in participants?
For some projects, they are very useful. For other projects, not so much. I think Google has gotten better at sussing out which ones will bear fruit, and which ones wont. As for Ubuntu, if anything upstream of Debian gets accepted, then Ubuntu benefits. Fedora primarily benefits only when RedHat puts out code, so they may need it more (but I don't know exact details, I'm not Google and I didn't decide). I'm thinking of at least one project (Blender), and the GSOC projects usually get incorporated, although they may not quite be finished or fully fledged at the end of the summer. Occasionally they will sit and wait, unincorporated into the main code base, until other larger pieces are completed.
Yes it is helpful, in our case most of the code produced under the GSoC program is good and welcome, and the program does have other benefits, like the chocolate party at the mentor summit (this is the real reason we get to apply). More eyes on the source code, and in many instances mentors have donated their mentorships (500$) to their own projects, which means GSoC is another venue of income for FOSS projects. For instance, a student has contacted us after the program finished because he wants his GSoC work to be his degree project. We have not been selected this year, but we'll keep on trying in next editions for sure.
The website isn't something.google.com, and it wants you to set Javascript. Is it a trap? (The worms..... the spice....)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The point of LU is get kids to love learning. I've taught and organized for some LU events in the past, and they are truly awesome, and the people involved are great. Most LU administrators/volunteers are fresh out of college (or still in college), and all are intent on sharing their love of learning with the world.
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/learningu
For background, LU programs started out of MIT and are spreading across the nation. The tech infrastructure they've built allows an incredibly small number of college students to reliably run huge "teach/learn anything" events that inspire hundreds or thousands of younger students.
Helping out with their dev projects will give you a tangible impact on thousands of high school students in the short term, and hopefully a whole generation in the long term if they continue their exponential growth...
Specifically, my X.org student last year did some great work in the r300g Gallium driver for Mesa, and is still a developer in the project to this day. There's a single success story. I'm sure the other several thousand success stories will be along shortly.
~ C.
Sometimes useful, sometimes not. It really depends on the student. We got a couple of regular Étoilé developers to hack on GNUstep as part of the GNU project's GSoC entry last year. One wrote a DBUS to Distributed Objects bridge, which lets us use DBUS objects as if they were local Objective-C objects (and export objects via DBUS in a couple of lines of code), the other worked on our CoreGraphics implementation. Both produced good results. On the other hand, we've had some complete failures. I had one a couple of years ago who made excuses right up until the halfway point, then vanished completely.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
maybe they can pay someone to write code so you don't need javascript to view the whole list.
The success rates vary from year to year, but last year we (Crystal Space) had 6 successful students, all of whom had their code integrated into trunk development very shortly after GSoC ended.
I don't think you can totally judge success from how the mentoring organisation benefited however. Imo the main point of GSoC is to give students experience in working with/on open source projects. There were a few discussions on this at the GSoC mentor summit last year, I think a lot of people (not really orgs, just people looking in at the program) miss that success should be partly judged by how well the students 'grew' as developers (both technically and in how they interact with other developers), not just by whether they met their project goals and contributed something useful to the organisation.
One specific result - Angie Byron is the Drupal 7 co-maintainer. She was a Summer of Code participant - http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/interview-angie-byron-drupal
http://scikit-learn.sourceforge.net/
started as GSoC and has grown into a very active project.
Here's the project I worked on for GSoC 2010:
http://commons.apache.org/sandbox/gsoc/2010/scxml-js/
I haven't done a stable release yet, due to some process overhead with Apache Commons, but the project itself is pretty stable, is becoming more widely known, and I'm continuing to develop it as part of my Master thesis.
This was a project I had thought of several years ago, and the funding from GSoC finally enabled me to properly implement it. So, I think that's a success story.
A specific result - See the cover of the April 2011 Linux Journal ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/interview-angie-byron-drupal). She was a Summer of Code participant for Drupal and now is the Drupal 7 co-maintainer.
It is unfair to bring up that Ubuntu was not selected without bringing up that Debian was selected on the 2011 Google Summer of Code program. Most contributions to the Debian project end up also helping Ubuntu. The fact that Ubuntu was not directly selected should not matter.
The modifications made to the forcedeth driver last year as part of the gpxe\etherboot GSOC significantly helped with my workload.