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Summer of Code Deadline Extended 6 Days

Posted by kdawson on Tue Apr 01, 2008 10:04 PM
from the slackers-rejoice dept.
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mithro writes "If you thought that you had missed out on applying to the Google Summer of Code, you've just gotten a reprieve. The deadline for student submissions has been extended from the original April 1 to Monday April 7, 2008. To quote Leslie Hawthorn: 'This year, we experimented with the Google Summer of Code program timeline, providing one week for students to discuss project ideas with their mentors and then a single week to submit applications. The good news is that we've heard that overall application quality is much higher this year and that students have really benefited from the opportunity to have extra time to discuss their ideas with their potential mentors. However, we've still heard feedback from the community that it would be useful to provide more time for students to submit their applications, so we've done just that.'"
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[+] Google Announces Summer of Code 2008 110 comments
morrison writes "The 2008 Google Summer of Code is on. We have discussed this four-year-old tradition before (2005, 2006, 2007). Google will once again be hosting a program that gives computer science students a $4,500 stipend to work on open source software projects. Last year, Google funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries. As noted in the program FAQ, this year they hope to do even more. The #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode is already buzzing with activity."
Submission: Summer of Code deadline extended! by mithro (1079591)
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Summer of Code Deadline Extended 6 Days 38 Comments More /

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  • 1 Week Later (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:09PM (#22937450)
    "April Fools! We really didn't extend the deadline!"

  • Use the e-flux capacitor! (Score:5, Funny)

    by reverseengineer (580922) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:13PM (#22937466)
    Why not just submit your code using Gmail Custom Time [google.com]? Then you won't have to worry about deadlines at all- you can even apply to last year's Summer of Code if you want to!
  • Got I hope this isn't an April Fool's joke...late applicants get a card back "HAHA kidding! Deadline over!"

    Then again, it might teach them about the importance of deadlines...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jeffm2501 (839540) *
      This is indeed for real, it's been in discussion all weekend.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by mithro (1079591)
        The original announcement was made on the Monday, March 31, 2008 at 2:04 PM, I posted this announcment to Slashdot at Wednesday April 02, @12:34PM (although in my timezone it was closer to 10:00am). Both are outside the fateful 1st of April. Yay to failing at reading dates.
  • Google has already pulled a pretty good April Fools joke [google.com]. I don't think they would pull a lame one like this.
  • Which one was it! I know it was one of you! I know the april fools is somewhere! SHOW YOURSELF! COME OUT! *twitch*

  • Gaming projects again! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mithro (1079591) <slashdot@m[ ]is.com ['ith' in gap]> on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:41PM (#22937586) Homepage

    I know I posted roughly this comment in the last GSoC Slashdot announcement but I've been told the information is really useful and some people might have missed it.

    On the note about how GSoC effects our project you should take a look at our web stats [sourceforge.net] since we where announced as a GSoC mentor organisation. The increase has been massive!

    Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.

    The following game projects have been accepted,

    • Battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org] (ideas [wesnoth.org]), a very cool tu rn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
    • BZFlag [bzflag.org] (ideas [bzflag.org]), the cla ssic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
    • Linden Lab [lindenlab.com] (ideas [secondlife.com]), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
    • ScummVM [scummvm.org] (ideas [scummvm.org]), an engine whic h lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
    • Thousand Parsec [thousandparsec.net] (ideas [thousandparsec.net]), a framework fo r building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
    • Tux4Kids [debian.org] (ideas [tuxpaint.org]), a group of mul ti-platform open source educational games for children.
    • WorldForge [worldforge.org] (ideas [worldforge.org]), one of the ori ginal open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

    The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec [thousandparsec.net] and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 [google.com] helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.

    This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).

    Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final [thousandparsec.net] evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.

    One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset [thousandparsec.net], is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.

    The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code [ohloh.net], more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a

    • Oh for those interested in Thousand Parsec specifically, since GSoC was announced we have made another release [thousandparsec.net]! (Plus the 0.3.1.1 Yay for releasing with major bugs release.)

      The client is getting a heap more usable and we could really use people actually helping test the game! If you are a hardcore 4X game fan, I would highly recommend checking it out.

    • I'm working with the OLPC project to develop the open source version of Micropolis (SimCity) for the OLPC, in C++ and Python, and we're looking for students who want to work on it for the Summer of Code.

      The source is portable C++ and Python code, and compiles and runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. It uses GTK, Cairo and Pango to draw graphics and text. Here is the Micropolis project home [google.com] on Google Code, and some development ideas [donhopkins.com] on my web site.

      I've been working on the MicropolisCore code in my spare ti

    • I think what would kick some serious butt is if someone would implement network play ability to MAME games, e.g. you have a connection to your buddy, you both have Mario Bros. up and the screens are in sync, and player A controls are on machine 1 and player B controls are on remote machine 2.

      Probably a bitch with latency, but over a short network hop I'm sure something reasonable could be achieved for some games?

      Or maybe I should start working on that.. hmmmm.....

    • Re:Issues with the extension (Score:5, Interesting)

      by quercus.aeternam (1174283) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:48PM (#22937620) Homepage
      curse me and my lack of formatting...

      I'm applying for the SoC and unfortunately, yes, this is true.

      I've got a couple of work options lined up for the summer, but which job I accept depends upon whether or not my proposal gets accepted.

      Unfortunately, it seems that the entire schedule is being pushed back by a week. That means that instead of selecting students by the 14th, the selection will be done by the 21st. That's in the middle of finals. Ideally, I would start working the week after, but most companies like to have a define answer sooner than that.

      Options follow:
      • Instead of letting my already quite decent application stand, I can modify it like crazy, adding anything I can think of, and accept this job combination
      • Forget the SoC altogether
      • Hope that the companies are fine with me not accepting or denying for another 3 weeks, and expecting them to be all right with my starting within a week from when I give notice.

      I'm really excited about this extension.
  • Got 6 more days.

    Now I can go back to bed.

  • This Is Great Prep. For The Real World (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2008, @11:23PM (#22937750)
    Working hard, figuring out what a realistic scope will be for the given timeline, completing the assigned task right on time, only to see the deadline extended. People who over-extended themselves or were simply too lazy get another chance while your astutely-scoped project might not be easily expandable or able to otherwise make use of this extra time.

    It's a great lesson for college kids in how life works; they'll get over feeling screwed (though their esteem for Google may drop).
    • I guess it really depends on what skills they are looking for: ability to honor deadlines or ability to come up with outstanding projects. If it's the latter then there is no reason to penalize procrastinators.

      Also, I don't really see how that's unfair to people who finished earlier: they got an extra week to expand their proposal just like everybody else.

  • Off-topic, but... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...isn't it time the "Software" category was represented by something else than a shiny disc icon?
  • 1) The extension was done on Monday, so it can't be april fools. Slashdot is just almost two days behind in reporting it...

    2) The real reason the extension was done was because many organizations complained about the lower quality and less interest from students (info taken from the mentor mailinglist)

    And about (2) I can just give this hint: If you're a student outside America, why would you work two months for just 4500 dollar? That is certainly not enough if you convert it to another currency. Getting
    • Are you trying to say that Picasa and Google Earth were created by Google Summer Of Code students, or that they were originally open source programs or something?
    • Oh... I feel rather foolish for applying to write Samba's 3.2 user space ACLs, then. Not sure how the 'Goog' is going to turn that in to their own proprietary software. Or, you have not the first idea what you're talking about.
    • Just as a point of interest, the sponsoring organization can use any (open source?) license they want to.

      Even more interestingly, if Google is your sponsoring organization, you retain all rights to your work.
  • If you are looking for a fun project to apply to - there are currently only 20 Blender applicants - so a good proposal has pretty good odds of getting selected. Also working on 3D is lots of fun.

    LetterRip
  • Take a look at our nice little project [zumastor.org] to change the face of storage on Linux, with snapshotting, replicating, NFS and Samba serving, and loads of cutting edge storage technology. Plenty of kernel and userspace code still to design and implement, to make our already-working system better, faster, shinier. 3D gui? Sure, we'll take it.
  • Hi, For those students with Electrical Engineering interests, check out the gEDA project [seul.org]. This deadline extension is quite nice as there are still lots of interesting projects [seul.org] for students to work on. :) -Ales

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