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Google Announces Summer of Code 2008
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Feb 25, 2008 09:39 PM
from the endless-sunshine dept.
from the endless-sunshine dept.
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."
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Developers: Google Launches Summer of Code 376 comments
chrisd writes "We're very happy to launch the Summer of Code today, and I thought Slashdot readers would be interested and might even help us spread the word (We have a flyer, even). The program is designed to give computer science, and other, students a stipend ($4500) while they learn to release and create open source software. We're working with a variety of Open Source software foundations and organizations and we hope to sign up around 200 developers. We hope the end result will be more open source developers! I'll be pleased to answer questions in the comment stream about this program. Thanks!"
[+]
Developers: Summer of Code 2006 is On 117 comments
chrisd writes "The Summer of Code is officially on again this year. As of today, we're taking in applications from mentoring organizations, so watch that list of mentoring organizations grow! Then, starting May 1st, we'll start taking student applications.
We've prepared two FAQs, one for Mentors and one for Students. We've also have created an IRC channel and Google Group for you. The website for the Summer of Code can be found at http://code.google.com/soc/."
[+]
Developers: Google Launches Summer of Code 2007 74 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Google has announced that it will be doing Summer of Code again this year. The program looks pretty much the same this year but they have built time into the program schedule for students to get up to speed before they start coding. Nice job, Google."
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Developers: Summer of Code'08 Organizations List Announced 48 comments
kulbirsaini writes "Google has announced the list of accepted organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2008. 'No doubt many would-be Summer of Code students are wondering what their next steps should be. We've changed the program timeline this year, leaving a week in between the announcement of accepted mentoring organizations and opening for student applications. Use this week to meet your potential mentors and discuss your project ideas with them, and keep on eye on the program mailing lists, as we'll post notes about additional resources for learning about our mentoring organizations.'"
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Summer of Code Deadline Extended 6 Days 38 comments
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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What should get precedence? (Score:2)
I personally hope Blender gets work.
Re:What should get precedence? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:What should get precedence? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What should get precedence? (Score:4, Informative)
1 - Any complex app will likely have some memory leaks. The code has been very thoroughly examined and cleaned up for Firefox 3.
2 - Most "leaks" come from poorly written extensions/add-ons. Run without them and check out the difference.
3 - There is a feature in Firefox that you can easily turn off, that people mistake for a memory leak. Firefox keeps fully rendered versions of pages in memory, in addition to the standard cache on the hard disk. If you hit back, Firefox doesn't need to re-render the page. Browse a while, and Firefox will use up plenty of memory. If you don't like this behavior, then turn the feature off.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Turning off bfcache might be useful for rudimentary leak detection, but a proper leak-detection tool [mozilla.org] is less likely to be confused by fragmentation, other caches, or the OS simply not reclaiming memory that the application has relinquished.
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People keep saying they want Firefox small and fast, and now you're complaining about modularity?
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Re:What should get precedence? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Re:What should get precedence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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of course, the details of the coding are in the hands of project leads, but i don't think anybody ever expects a different situation at that level
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Regarding the Obama ad served on this page: "It's a cookbook!!!"
Re:What should get precedence? (Score:5, Informative)
Thousand Parsec [thousandparsec.net] (a game framework for turn based strategy games) was one of the mentor organisations last year [google.com].
The effect on our project was really huge, not only did the students do some very [thousandparsec.net] cool [google.com] work [thousandparsec.net]. We now have the creditability to approach Universities and help get their students involved with our project.
We already have one student working on Thousand Parsec as part of a high school internship [ohloh.net] and two students from the University of South Australia [unisa.edu.au] working on a Java MIDP client.
Thanks a huge amount to Google and the Summer of Code team, hopefully we can get in again this year and have even more fun!
Parent
MonoDevelop (Score:2)
I'd mentor someone myself for some of these tasks, if I were related to the project as anything more than "user"
YAML c++ library (Score:2)
4th year in a row? (Score:5, Funny)
OpenMoko, coreboot, and ATI video drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Too bad I get paid too much and actually have a real job. I'm being serious, it would be awesome to do a summer of code.
Re:OpenMoko, coreboot, and ATI video drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Metascore sure needs developers (Score:2, Interesting)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/metascore/ [sourceforge.net]
write a decent reporting tool (Score:2, Insightful)
without it OSS in business still has a big FAIL stamped on it's forehead.
Re: (Score:2)
What you really mean to say is that, without this specific tool, you'd have to change some of your business processes in order to use different software. The funny thing is that it's a different tool for each person who makes this complaint.
It's perfectly possible to use FOSS to support running pretty much any business. The only real exception is where the business itself is to produce data in proprietary file formats - i.e. acting a
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reporting sevrices provides a really good tool for this, and OSS has no answer to it. it'd be nice if there was one.
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My hope... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
Great job, Google!
Check out Gladex (Score:5, Interesting)
Gladex is a Python application which takes a
Re:Check out Gladex (Score:4, Interesting)
I might be missing something, but libglade has a python wrapper (and probably Ruby/Perl too, I'm too lazy to check). You can connect signals and handle events, everything you can do with generated or self-written GTK+ code. Calling libglade in Python is about 4 LOC. Why would anyone need a generator for this?
Again, I'm not trolling here, just curious and both an avid GTK+ and Python user.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The one very important thing you can do with generated code that you can't do with a 4-line call to libglade is customize the code. A library can't do everything custom code can do, though good libraries seem to cover 80-90% of the most common use cases. For many applications, the libraries do everything you need. For everything else, you'd like to generate the commonplace code from your glade design
Have ANY projects been completed and integrated? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are there ANY success stories?
Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. My fellow SoC students and I participating with Nmap last year have lots of code in Nmap proper. And the years before that (Nmap has participated every year of the SoC) there were a whole lot of cool things added to Nmap proper from SoC work.
Parent
Have ANY projects actually been useful? (Score:3, Interesting)
MythTV? You're joking, right?
More importantly, are they going to work on anything actually *useful*, instead of sexy stupid stuff that is the 2008 equivalent of "skinning" mp3 players? Every time I heard about SoC participants, I noticed that a)it wasn't something really useful or important and b)the main development team was really lazy about integrating in the work the student had done.
A great example of where some SoC lovin' would be great: Netatalk *blows*. It doesn't handle sleeping clients that
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i've only followed the ones in projects i am interested in, and there hve been some very nice finished features (as well as some disappointing failures).
a quick estimate on things i paid attention to, some 3/4 to 4/5 of projects were completed succesfully. remaining either delivered less than promised or failed completely (student just disappearing...).
Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated (Score:4, Informative)
Other things may not have made it in, but were good research projects both for the project and for the students; FreeBSD now has a very functional port of OpenBSD's hardware sensors suite, though it wasn't accepted into base because of architectural concerns. gjournal started life as a SoC project, and while rejected it did help spur development of a new more functional one, and the student went on to produce gvirstor, the aforementioned GEOM storage virtualisation layer which *did* make it. The Linux KVM port got far enough to boot FreeBSD 7 as a guest and will hopefully continue development. I'm sure I've left lots out.
Just because a SoC project doesn't make it into a "product", doesn't mean that project wasn't a success. Even if it never produces something deployable, it's given a student some experience in development, it's given the project some interesting if not necessarily immediately useful code and it's helped lay groundwork for future development, even if it only does so by providing those concerned some experience.
Parent
t-shirts (Score:2)
computer science students? (Score:2)
For example, my program of study is Music Technology, where we have lots of students working on audio-related software projects, and many which become contributions to open source. It's a graduate program, so we have lots of students who came from other disciplines in a previous life, many which were CS, but not all. One student last year wrote a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite true, but why do Google restrict participation to students?
The first goal listed on their SoC FAQ is:
``Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all''
So why exclude professional developers who could crank out code?
I would dearly like to take a two-month sabbatical from work and
concentrate solely on writing code. There are huge voids in the
provision of free astronomical tools that could be addressed. But
finances dictate othe
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Some people will bitch about anything and everything I guess.
Small Winner and Big Winner (Score:2)
Intern = small winner
Even when you add the small winners together, Google still wins. Lot's of outstanding brainpower for dirt cheap.
I guess everyone wins if the interns like the cash and see it as a resume builder, right?
Re:Small Winner and Big Winner (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
M$ could do the same (Score:2)
They will just support their own 'open source' definition.
Quick introduction for those thinking of applying (Score:3, Informative)
BZFlag [bzflag.org] participated in the Google Summer of Code for the first time in 2007 [google.com]. Our participation was documented in this detailed article [bzflag.org] (Warning: 15 MB PDF).
Another higher-level summary was put together for a presentation and is available here [bzflag.org] (Warning: 5 MB PDF)
See the presentation for the quick introduction. I highly recommend the article to any students and projects/mentors that are seriously thinking about participating for the first time.
On the whole, it's a great opportunity for projects but you do have to put in a lot of time and effort. You have to have your act together. If you do, the students and the projects will both have a great time.
Re:Kids have it lucky these days (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually Nick Bishop who did SoC with Blender 2 years ago, and with Inkscape (I think?) last year, had pretty good code quality already as a high school student.
LetterRip
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