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Google Summer of Code Announces Mentor Projects 44

mithro writes "As everyone should already know, Google is running the Summer of Code again this year. For those who don't know, GSoC is where Google funds student's to participate in Open Source projects and has been running for 5 years, bringing together over 2600 students and 2500 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide. Google has just announced the projects which will be mentor organizations this year. It includes a great list of Open Source projects from a wide range of different genres, include content management systems, compilers, many programming languages and even a bunch of games!"
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Google Summer of Code Announces Mentor Projects

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  • by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @05:02PM (#27261581) Journal
    maybe they will finally get video and audio chat working.
    • Probably not, since they could have done so for years, if they wanted to, but they didnt. The Pidgin developers collectively suffered the "we want Pidgin to stay lean and mean, but cam and voice would bring bloat" mental illnes. So they wholeheartedly drove all of their potential users into Skype/MSN/YIM/ICQ/AIM. A decade older, they probably would have been the people who opposed IRC colors as "bloat"and fought them tooth and nail until practically everybody except them moved along.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It was never about "bloat", it was about time and interest. Pidgin has 0 full time developers, only hobbyists, so what tends to be worked on is what they, themselves, are interested in.

        As far back as 2006 (when I was an SOC student) I saw one of the main developers saying he didn't find voice/video interesting, but if someone paid him to do it, he'd make the time. Some of the volunteer developers DO care, but they're time restrained with jobs, families, etc.

        As always is the case in open source, "Patches W

  • Long term plan (Score:4, Informative)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @05:11PM (#27261681) Journal
    Looking at the site, I noticed that Ubuntu has a list of projects to work on which are mostly from the Brainstorm [ubuntu.com] site. Most of the other projects have no such plan. I think this is what puts Ubuntu ahead of so many other open source projects.
    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Did you actually look at the proposed Summer of Code projects ? Most of them are either absurdly short, absurdly long or outright impossible (like 'fix dvd support', it's not because of a software problem that no linux distribution can ship DeCSS...).
  • One of the links in the summary is to http://durpal.org/ [durpal.org] . I wonder if that is a fork from http://drupal.org [drupal.org]

    Also, it is interesting to see the long forgotten WorldForge on that list. Maybe Duke Nukem should go open source to get some of that good Google cash.
  • by rm999 ( 775449 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @05:44PM (#27262093)

    "GSoC is where Google funds student's to participate in Open Source projects"

    Maybe they should fund a class in grammar and spelling first :P

  • I'm curious -- are there any success stories from the Summer of Code, or do these projects get abandoned after 3 months?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Chabo ( 880571 )

      Supposedly last year's GSoC helped a great deal with FFmpeg, Pidgin, and Rockbox, among others.

    • Re:Success stories (Score:5, Informative)

      by vinn ( 4370 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @06:07PM (#27262345) Homepage Journal

      Yup - Wine has had quite a bit of success with these projects. Here's a link:

      We have all sorts of people apply to work on our SoC projects. The most successful SoC projects are ones where the student already has active involvement in the community and has already committed patches.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ironica ( 124657 )

      OpenMRS [openmrs.org] benefited from last year's SoC, and is on the list this year, too. Millions of people around the world are getting health care that's assisted by OpenMRS.

    • Re:Success stories (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jeffstar ( 134407 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @07:50PM (#27263371) Journal

      i recall one student's work was pretty much ignored. He modified gnome so different workspaces could have different background images.

      maybe the changes were too obtrusive or unmaintainable, but to me it points to a poor mentor. The mentor should have helped the student implement the changes in such a way that they could be accepted.
      see the student's blog [jsharpe.net] with the gnome bugzilla links.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        i recall one student's work was pretty much ignored. He modified gnome so different workspaces could have different background images. maybe the changes were too obtrusive or unmaintainable, but to me it points to a poor mentor.

        Or just Gnome decided that was a too advanced feature that the user shouldn't have. I did run into it recently with an "advanced" tab that used to be here when you google, but it turned out wasn't actually there anymore. Developer reason: "We took it away, it was a mistake having it there and powerusers know how to use gconf" except the tab contained exactly what it should IMO. Why I'm still on KDE 3.5.10 and will be moving to KDE 4.2 with Jaunty, KDE4.0 might have been a technical trainwreck but at least c

        • Or just Gnome decided that was a too advanced feature that the user shouldn't have.

          yeah. Bad choice if project for SoC then ... student slave Implement this feature we don't want!

    • by 68kmac ( 471061 )

      Google's own Open Source Blog [blogspot.com] has a bunch of success stories from last year.

  • by spiffmastercow ( 1001386 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @06:00PM (#27262277)
    I'm just intimidated by the magnitude of the requested projects. Anyone have any experience with GSoC? How much mentoring do you tend to get? I'd hate to sign up, then not know where to get started, or hit a brick wall, and be told "well you should have thought of that before you applied".
    • by FishWithAHammer ( 957772 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @06:04PM (#27262311)

      I participated twice so far, applying again this year just because I enjoy it.

      My mentoring experience was very uneven. One mentor was very good, the other very crap. I completed my projects for both without a hitch, but the time without a good mentor was much more difficult.

      It's a little bit of a crapshoot. You're more likely to get in if you target smaller groups, but you're more likely to get good support if you target larger groups. YMMV.

    • In general, the successful projects are the ones where the student is a contributor before the SoC starts, and is using the funding to work full-time on a project that they are already familiar with. There are exceptions, but most of the projects where the student did not already have knowledge of the project have ended up being a waste of time for the mentor and student. If you want to participate in the SoC, my advice is spend some time reading the code for a project you're interested in, send in some p
  • Student's? (Score:4, Funny)

    by zindorsky ( 710179 ) <zindorsky@gmail.com> on Thursday March 19, 2009 @06:24PM (#27262541)

    Google funds student's

    Google funds a student's what?

    Here's a link to explain 3rd grade grammar:

    Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots [angryflower.com]

  • by GrAfFiT ( 802657 ) on Thursday March 19, 2009 @06:41PM (#27262725) Homepage

    Debian is welcoming students once again this year. I was a 2008 GSoC student at Debian and am returning this year to admin the GSoC program at Debian. I had a very exciting experience, participating in meetups with a lot of Debian developers all over Europe and I recommend you to apply at Debian to share this experience.

    We have a huge range of project possibilities, from our famous packaging system (.deb ftw) to debian-specific developer tools and infrastructure (want to work on our multi-arch distributed build farm ?) or hardware support (because Debian runs everywhere, from tiny ARM devices to country-wide computing grids). We have you all covered.

    Remember that Debian and its derivatives are the largest group of Linux distributions in the world. That's a huge community you'll be working with, and I should say, an amazing concentration of talent.

    If you are interested, visit: http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc [debian.org], join us on IRC on: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org or follow us on twitter [twitter.com] of identi.ca [identi.ca] (DebianGSoC).

    Also, see our mailing-list announcement [debian.org] for more pratical information.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Fix the Drupal link in the article please

    It's not a good idea to link to a domainer site.

  • Applying This Year! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Eli Gottlieb ( 917758 ) <eligottlieb@noSpAm.gmail.com> on Thursday March 19, 2009 @08:21PM (#27263625) Homepage Journal

    I'm applying with a group of students from UMass to write Java bindings for the LLVM intermediate-code generation libraries. Anyone want to help?

  • Opencog and the Singularity Institute. When it's done, there won't be any more summer of codes. You'll become the code--seriously.

  • The Perl Foundation [perlfoundation.org] was accepted as an organization in Google Summer of Code 2009! I am excited to be the organization administrator.

    Students interested in learning more about applying for GSoC2009 with TPF can join the mailing list [google.com] and read up on The Perl Foundation wiki [perlfoundation.org] . For breaking news you can follow me at @dukeleto [twitter.com] or join us on IRC on #soc-help on irc.perl.org .

    Parrot Foundation [parrot.org] is within the umbrella of The Perl Foundation this year, so if you want to work on the hottest virtual machine that just h

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