Submitted by “Google Summer of Code 2007 is on! Last year, Google funded over 600 students in 93 countries to work with 100 open source groups. We’re extremely happy to announce that we’ll be holding Google Summer of Code again this year. We look forward to helping new contributors join the community and write more code.”
I like the Google Summer of Code it gives many developers the experience of how it feels to be part of an open source project. I’m glad to see that two of my favorite open source projects are among the list Gentoo and NetBSD.
Seem like as the SOC draws nearer we get a lot of articles listing the awesome sounding projects that will be part of the SOC. While previews are nice, I’d love to see an article when it’s all over listing how much actually got done. I have no idea how it turned out the previous two years, aside from individual projects I may have tracked down myself. A brief rundown of the results of the project afterwards would not be amiss.
Most of the projects that get selected are either too big to be completed, such as the FreeBSD attempt at reworking launchd as a replacement startup system, or so small they should not have been accepted, such as FreeBSD’s update to it’s website.
Most of the attempts at creating filesystems progressed, but didn’t get halfway there. The BSD SNMPD implementation got most of the way there when it was a SoC, but never completed, same with CSup, the C reimplementation of CVSup (and CSup had already existed prior to the SoC).
While a final report would have been nice, if you cared about any one project, the mentoring organizations almost all kept status pages, so it was not needed. A report of all the projects’ results would have been big.
Edited 2007-02-17 21:00
There were articles on the results of the 2006 SoC. I’m not sure if there was a single page, but some results were even posted to OSAlert:
http://osnews.com/story.php/12699/Googles-Summer-of-Code
My impression is that the majority of the projects don’t get 100% completed during the allotted time, but that many of the participants continue working on them afterwards.
Regardless, Google is investing in the future of OSS, and they’re doing so in a very effective way. They are spreading the wealth across a great variety of projects and doing their best to make sure that best candidates with the most meaningful ideas get funded.
Now, I’d argue that Google is making so much money on the back of the OSS community that they should be investing more, but that’s just my personal opinion. I’m still waiting for Google to bring us a next-gen build system and hyper-linked source browser that integrates with Google Code. THAT would be a little much for an SoC project.
As a company, google’s sense of enlightened self-interest is doing the world of free and open source software a whole lot of good.
Going the next mile and supporting open source operating systems with all of their apps would be truly a vote of conficence for FLOSS and a clear example of where they stand. They have began doing some of this, but more is needed.
One last thing I appreciate is the ability to save in ODF in Google’s apps (word processor and spreadsheet).
I hope Haiku gets a chance this time.
It’s not like Google cares which projects get involved, Haiku just has to have mentors willing to work with students and students interested in making code. ReactOS was one of the organizations that participated, though nothing actually got finished.
Haiku representatives just need to pick a single person to submit its application via the GSoC web app between March 5-12, 2007. And of course, have achievable goals.
That is not true, unfortunately. We applied in plenty of time last year and followed all of the guidelines and were turned down. Google (believe it or not
) has a finite amount of money and chooses the projects that they want to support.
Let us hope that Google’s left hand knows what its right hand is doing.
Nothing worse than a company that has two minds about the same topic.
So did JLG say anything of significance to you off stage ? Did Google ?
They really don’t care Mike, just look at how many of the projects involved last year, and even the year before, were in competition with one another. NetBSD/FreeBSD/Fedora/Ubuntu/GNU/Debian/Gentoo/OpenSuSE/OpenSolaris/Re actOS, Pearl/PHP/Mono/Python/Ruby/Haskell, GNOME/KDE/Project Looking Glass, Daisy/Drupal/LiveJournal, Monotone/Subversion… Well, I am sure I’ve missed other projects that compete with one another, but you get the idea.
Perhaps the ideas that were suggested were considered out of the league of the SoC, perhaps they felt they’d already selected too many mentoring operating system projects, who knows really, but it is nothing personal, that’s for sure. It did say 100 groups, perhaps you were applicant 101?
Edited 2007-02-18 16:18
SoC is a brilliant concept which I love. There’s so many businesses out there trying to build goodwill by donating to the redcross and similar. I like Googles approach by donating to what is in it’s field of business. There’s nothing wrong with the red cross, just that I like the concept of giving back to “users” so to say.
I think we’ve seen great progress in projects thanks to SoC, now I just hope we get to see some more newcomers this year (Haiku comes to mind ;P).
Good luck everyone and let’s hope we see good things this year as well…
And get more guys working in bringing FreeBSD to desktop as well