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Google Pumps $6 Million Into Summer of Code 2011
darthcamaro writes "Google Summer of Code 2011 is now underway. Google is providing stipends for 1,116 students to mentor with 175 open source projects. In total, Google will be investing over $6 million dollars into Summer of Code 2011. There are a few project omissions this time around though. Neither Fedora nor Ubuntu have any students this year."
When you consider how helpful this is for recruitment and winning the hearts and minds of the programming elite this program is actually cheap. I would recommend governments and supranational organisations to do the same.
how do you intend to run LDD on something before it's compiled, when you can't compile it without the deps?
I don't mean to sound harsh, but has SETI produced any results that might justify further funding it? I understand the "it's cool!" factor, and I understand that we don't really expect to find alien civilizations every day, and I understand how important of a discovery it would be if we did discover intelligent extraterrestrial life... however, I also think that, given $5 million, we'll see far greater returns on investing that money in Summer of Code than we would supporting SETI. The expected results from SoC are clearly expressed for every one of the thousand programmers. What would investing in SETI get us, beyond, "Well, we'll keep looking, I guess."
Why don't you start your massive search engine / advertising website and do that then?
"...but I can't help but wonder how many STEM students we could encourage by redirecting just 1% of the U.S. national defense budget"
1% of ~685 billion? Uh, yeah, $6.8 billion aught to be enough to fund a lot of STEM students, given that 1% of the defense budget is more than the entire budget of the NSF in 2010 (~$5.5 billion).