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Google Launches Summer of Code

Posted by Zonk on Tue May 31, 2005 07:28 PM
from the better-than-the-summer-of-love dept.
Businesses Google The Internet Programming IT Technology
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!"
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[+] Technology: 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."
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Google Launches Summer of Code 50 Comments More /

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  • Wary of title.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by deglr6328 (150198) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:33PM (#12689750)
    Hopefully this venture will fare better than the Summer Of George.
  • I think it's wonderful Google is doing something like this. Then again, I don't think Google has done much that could be considered wrong as of late. There are two good rules of business that so many modern industries seem to forget. 1) Make a good product, which so far Google seems to be doing well, and 2) Don't make it a hassle for your customers to do business with you. If only other tech companies followed those two simple rules, they probably would be faring much better. If the recording industry followed these rules, they would . . . well, that's not going to happen any time soon.

    The one question I have is this: Why just students? Sure, it's always good to help out students (especially with money), but there are a lot of people out there who are doing this stuff on their own. You don't have to be in school to be trying to learn coding or work in open source (some of us do it as a hobby). This really isn't meant to be a complaint, it's a serious question, and I'm sure there is a good answer out there I just don't happen to know what it is.

    • Re:Why just students? (Score:5, Informative)

      by chrisd (1457) * <chrisd.dibona@com> on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:39PM (#12689801) Homepage
      From the faq:

      Who is eligible?

      Students. Since the point of the program is to create new developers, we're looking to find developers around the world who have considered creating free and open source software but who have not yet taken the plunge. We felt that concentrating on the student population was a good place to focus these efforts.

      Not from the faq:

      Basically, You gotta start somewhere.

      Chris

    • Re:Why just students? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by natrius (642724) <[niran] [at] [niran.org]> on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:40PM (#12689809) Homepage
      The one question I have is this: Why just students?

      If you open it up to everyone, it's harder to tell if the person will get the intended benefit out of it: education. Experienced coders could participate just for the money. The program isn't supposed to be mainly about the money, it's just there to get college students' eyes on developing open source software as an option.
    • Money given as a stipend for students is likely tax deductible. Money given to a random Amateur Joe Programmer likely isn't.
    • Because students are cut-throat slave laborers that will work hard, 24/7, based on sheer ideals then quickly sell-out come the first mortgage payment. Also, if nothing good comes out of this, they don't have to feel bad firing everyone in September.

      Everyone else is a liability.

    • "If only other tech companies followed those two simple rules, they probably would be faring much better."

      Sometimes the biggest hassle for your customers is having to pay for your products or services. It still baffles me that a company like Google could become profitable without a revenue stream. That is, until they popped up with their search appliances, Adwords, and so on. Keep in mind that many people want more bang for their buck - features and reducing hassle are often mutually exclusive.
      • Of course a company should be able to make money, and that's hard to do when the major services are provided for "free". So far, the best known (legitimate) way to make money from an otherwise "free" service is advertising.

        Again, Google is following the simple rule of Don't make it a hassle for your customers to do business with you. Google's advertisements are the best out there that I've seen. They don't try to jump out at you, they don't annoy you with flashing pictures or insipid audio, and a real

        • Re:Why just students? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by pmc (40532) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @04:52AM (#12692216) Homepage
          Again, Google is following the simple rule of Don't make it a hassle for your customers to do business with you. Google's advertisements are the best out there that I've seen. They don't try to jump out at you, they don't annoy you with flashing pictures or insipid audio, and a real attempt is made to make the advertisements relevant to the person viewing them.

          You appear to be under a misapprehension that you are a customer of google because you view their ads- you're not. You are their product. Their customers are the people that buy the ads.

    • Dude, just listen to Whitney:

      "I believe the children are our future
      Teach them well and let them lead the way
      Show them all the beauty they possess inside
      Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
      Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be"
      • I think you just answered the question.

        The point of this is to get people into the OSS fold who might otherwise just go down the all-proprietary path. A semi-commercial programmer who currently does some OSS programming doesn't need the help as much, they're already among the converted.

        Also, $4500 is a lot more money in relative terms to a college student than it is to someone who's gotten their first 'real' paycheck, so perhaps Google thinks they'll get more effort out of their money by buying from the c
  • I.e. that if you work hard and write really good software, you will be paid fairly well for your efforts?

  • *and* a free t-shirt! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Japong (793982) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:42PM (#12689826)
    So here's the skinny: we'll give $4,500 to applicants who successfully work with a sponsoring organization or advisor to create innovative or useful open source software. We'll also get you a t-shirt to go along with the cash.

    Holy hell... a t-shirt? I mean the cash, well I know Google has a ton of that, but where on earth are they finding these T-shirts to spare!? I hope they technology behind these Tees is open sourced, and machine washable. Think of how much further I could take my undergrad degree if I had a free t-shirt...

    • Good thing for that T-shirt, becasue at 4500/summer, that's about $865/hr (assuming only 40hr/week for 13 weeks). After self-employment taxes, you're better off in a McJob.

      Of course, if you live in India or China, that's a fortune. But I'd say any US college student should be able to do MUCH better interning.
  • Not everyone who reads and posts here is reflected by the recent trend of snivelling whiners (and nearly all the first round of posts). I'm not sure if I'm just getting old (a possibility) or if the quality of the comments is really as bad as I think it is.

    This is GREAT step forward for Google and I hope that many other companies will follow Google's lead. IBM? Sun?

  • which is it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fiftyLou (472705) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:45PM (#12689843)


    When exactly is the application deadline?

    The "summer of code" page [google.com] says June 24th. The pdf [google.com] linked from there says June 14th.

    ('Course if those were reversed I could've made some smart assed comment about the extra 10 days accounting for Adobe's pdf reader to launch).

  • A little late... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Embedded Geek (532893) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:45PM (#12689853) Homepage
    It would have been a better idea to post this sooner. Many schools have already completed finals as of last week.

    Lacking a date on the flyer, I don't know if this is Google's fault or it just took a while to hit slashdot. Good idea, anyway.

  • Open source (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Bungi (221687) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:47PM (#12689869) Homepage
    Google just recently [google.com] started giving lip service to open source, after some people noticed they had really given nothing back to the Movement given that their infrastructure is largely built on free software (or open source or whatever it's called this week).

    What's the point of this, really? Why is Google suddenly so interested in fostering open source? And why only students? More pliable to the idea of giving your work away?

    • Dude, thousands of companies run their infrastructure on open source without open-sourcing their own apps or sponsoring open source development. Google has gone way beyond the call of duty here; we should be commending them for that.

      Google wants to encourage the development of open-source software partly out of the goodness of their hearts, partly as a PR tactic, and partly to take a stab at MS. This program is only for students because they want to encourage new developers to work on open-source projects.

  • I'm a college student (Score:5, Interesting)

    by herrvinny (698679) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:47PM (#12689872)
    And I am definitely going to enter, as soon as I have a suitable idea. To hell with the money (although it is nice, I'll probably buy a Xbox 360 + games with it), I'd do it just for the chance to have "Google Project Assistant/Implementor" on my resume. Although, a bigger list of organizations would be nice. I hope more open source organizations jump in.

  • Direction (Score:5, Interesting)

    by miyako (632510) <miyako@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:48PM (#12689878) Homepage Journal
    This looks like a really interesting project. I've often wanted to get into open source development, but the most I've done is to submit a minor bugfix to a project. What seems nice about this project is that it gives some direction on how to get started. I think the idea of hooking a student up with experienced developers also adds to this direction. The problem I've found when trying to contribute to open source software is that few people seem willing to help you get started.
    I'm definitely thinking of applying, but why GNOME and the perl foundry but no KDE or Java Foundry? never been fond of Perl or GTK+ myself, and I don't know anything about Python or .NET so my options are kind of limited :(
    • why GNOME and the perl foundry but no KDE or Java Foundry?

      At a guess, google are building a corporate strategy around the first two technologies and would like these projects to yield results that they would find useful.

      Normally I dislike arguments of the form "it's their dollar so they can do what they like" but in this case, it doesn't seem to odious a restriction.

  • Just great (Score:5, Funny)

    by Locke2005 (849178) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:52PM (#12689908)
    Our parents had the "Summer of Love", where they all flocked to San Francisco etc. to do drugs and have sex, and all we get is this lousy "Summer of Code", where we get to DO WORK on our summer vacation?!?

  • Spectacular (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spludge (99050) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @07:56PM (#12689938)
    This is spectacular. I mean talk about giving back to the community. I wish that google would pay the students on a bi-weekly basis though. When I was a student I would have leaped at this opportunity, but the lack of a stream of cash would have made it extremely difficult to take.

    It is more of a motivator to give the cash in one lump sum at the end of the summer, and it reduces the possibility for fraud, but many students need cash to scrape by.

    Anyways, go google, I hope these 200 student developers do amazing things over this summer!

  • Suppose you have a brilliant idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hektor_Troy (262592) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:20PM (#12690094)
    You've even worked on it a bit during your comp.sci. classes, but it's not done, nor is it quite working.

    Where would you submit something like that?

    I ask because along with a friend, I have been working on what we believe to be a highly innovative application for a neural network, that - if we can get it working - you will definately love to have.

    Problem is two-fold:
    1) It's in the proof-of-concept stage, and our first attempt failed to even be a proof. We think this was due to crappy data to start with
    2) It's not something that fits naturally into any of the mentioned organizations. The closest is Apache, but that's purely because they have a ton of Java-applications already.

    The most "natural" organization for our idea, would probably be Google itself.

    So what should we do?
  • "Your mentoring organization will determine if you have met the goals of your application."

    Excellent idea to have them write a product specification, than have to MEET the spec to get paid.

  • Great project - no Mozilla? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sgarrity (262297) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:51PM (#12690307) Homepage
    This is fantastic - nice work to those who hatch the idea and created this great project.

    I'm surprised to see that the Mozilla Foundation isn't on the list of participating organizations [google.com]. Seems they'd be a good fit.

    Anyhow, bravo!

  • Some questions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bigberk (547360) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Wednesday June 01 2005, @12:29AM (#12691422)
    Are graduate students considered eligible students? (e.g. summer between completed undergraduate degree and upcoming Master's program). Yes, I need money.

    Is a programmer eligible for this if they already have been developing open source software? In other words, they already have experience working with OSS projects and producing public code.

  • Differences (Score:3, Insightful)

    by taskforce (866056) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @04:28AM (#12692154) Homepage
    This really highlights the differences between MS and Google. A while ago you could sign an exclusive deal with Microsoft to liscence some of their unused tech projects which they figured were too expensive/superflous to work on. Now Google is paying YOU to work on software which is free for everyone.

    I was gonna try and fit a Soviet Russia joke in there but I felt it would detract from my post.

  • Wine Resources (Score:3, Informative)

    by vinn (4370) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @06:01PM (#12699706) Homepage Journal

    The Wine project has put together a list of resources to help someone thinking about this figure out a project. You might find the following helpful:

    • Re:Slashdot becomes a shill for google (Score:5, Insightful)

      by damiam (409504) on Tuesday May 31 2005, @08:06PM (#12690004)
      A shill for Google? If any other company were putting up close to a million dollars in bounty money for open-source development, it'd be huge news. Hell, Novell offered $25000 in GNOME bounties a year ago and we got at least two separate /. stories about it. This is exactly the sort of news for nerds that /. exists to report (as are, incidently, both of the other Google stories on the FP). Should /. just start rejecting all stories pertaining to Google, just because Google is working on a lot of cool stuff?
    • Any student from any country.

      (except for those countries the US State Department forbids us from working with... the "terrorist" countries)

      So yeah... Canadians are welcome! :-)
    • Duh! You just summarized why they hit up students for free code: They're cheap! $4500 to a college kid going to a state school that his parents paid for is a *mint*. That's heavy drugs for a semester, or tuition if they have to pay their own way. That's the whole point. That's why companies fire experienced workers and hire young students: they're cheap and naive. $4500 wouldn't get me to even comment an open source program, never mind develop one.
    • No no no...

      We didn't make this clear enough. Those are merely ideas. Come up with anything you want and write a proposal!

      Feel like adding some new, cool feature to an existing OSS project? Fine. Want to write a plugin for a project? Fine.

      It is limited only by your creativity. We asked the organizations to produce some lists to spur people's imaginations. Not to limit them to just those projects!

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