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Summer of Code 2006 is On

Posted by Zonk on Fri Apr 14, 2006 03:04 PM
from the go-make-a-name dept.
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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/."
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[+] Summer of Code Now Taking Student Applications 122 comments
chrisd writes "Just wanted to let you know that we've opened up the student application process for the Summer of Code. We've signed up ~100 mentoring organizations this year, including Apache, Postgres, Xiph, The Shmoo Group, Drupal, Gallery and many others. We're accepting applications through May 8th this year."
[+] 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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Summer of Code 2006 is On 50 Comments More /

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  • Wouldn't it make more sense to be hosting it over at freenode? I have nothing against slashnet, but there's probably more coding discussion going on over there than any other irc network.

  • Dear Students, (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Dear Students (968511)
    Spend your summers doing stuff other than coding. Get a job working outside or at Mac Donalds. Once you graduate and spend your days coding, you'll wish you did. You have years of 'summers of code' ahead - at your job. Try something else while you have the chance.

    • Re:Dear Students, (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SeaFox (739806) on Friday April 14 2006, @03:18PM (#15132360)
      You have years of 'summers of code' ahead - at your job. Try something else while you have the chance.

      Yes, but those summers of coding will be heavily deadline driven and for projects one probably doesn't want to work on that much. Whereas a 'Summer of Code' is more about working on something of personal interest and learning. It's more a workshop than a day-job.

    • Re:Dear Students, (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Noishe (829350)
      Yes, students, spend your summer working in a greasy McDonalds getting the worlds largest pimple collection, instead of spending it doing something fun and challenging with flexible hours and working from home while doing something good for the state of humanity.

    • Re:Dear Students, (Score:3, Interesting)

      by VJ42 (860241)
      On the other hand, it's good practice, and if you do well it looks great on your CV
    • I was with you until "McDonald's".

    • Re:Dear Students, (Score:5, Insightful)

      by someone300 (891284) on Friday April 14 2006, @03:48PM (#15132571)
      Summer of code:
      - Working on something you enjoy
      - Possibility of getting 4500 USD personally and 500 USD for your favourite OSS project
      - Doing something that will benefit at least one person somewhere else in the world, if not many thousands.
      - Practice for future job probably
      - Something reasonably unique to put on CV

      McDonalds
      - Boring, hot, horrid job
      - Shit money
      - Further perpetuating the problem of obesity and heart problems by providing overweight middle aged men and women and their kids, for whom they can't be bothered to cook a nutritious meal, with their daily dose of fatty dead animal
      - Time spent doing repetitive tasks that require no skill or thought
      - Just another generic teenage job to put on your CV, if mentioned at all
    • I think you forgot how competitive the software development market is when you just come out of school. It's those people that have experience doing stuff like the summer of code that are going to get jobs after school, not the guy who worked at McDonalds because he felt that he'd never get the chance once he starts real work.
    • I hear what you're saying, but it's likely that this fun project that you choose to work on will be the most used piece of code you ever write in your career.

    • Re:Dear Students, (Score:5, Insightful)

      by It'sYerMam (762418) <thefishfaceNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday April 14 2006, @06:46PM (#15133454) Homepage
      If you're going to do CS, don't even bother listening to this guy. You get out of University, and all the job offers are asking for experience. I don't think they mean experience in McDonalds. Summer of Code is a way to make a quick buck, doing something fun and challenging that will look hella good on a CV or application. I don't see any negative points except for the effort required...
  • I was too young to participate in the competition last year, but I've been hoping against hope that the SOC would happen again this year.

    Count me in, in other words.

    I really think it's great that Google's taken this step to advocating Open Source among the future of software development (ie, students). It's exciting and a ton of great Open Source groups benefit from the fruits of these kids' labors.

    Kudos to you, Google.

  • What happened to all last years projects? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SeaFox (739806) on Friday April 14 2006, @03:16PM (#15132346)
    I think it would be nice to find out what ultimately became of all the work done on last summer's coding. Voice/Video support for Gaim was one of the Summer of Code projects last year, and it's still a feature being pushed further into the roadmap.

  • The Sunlight it Burns (Score:5, Funny)

    by Soporific (595477) on Friday April 14 2006, @03:16PM (#15132349)
    Do they really need a contest to keep nerds a pasty white/translucent color? It's not like summer was going to get anyone out of the basement. ;)

    ~S
  • Maybe I blinked and missed it, but I never saw a simple list of the successfully delivered SoC2005 projects. Where are they? Where will the 2006 projects be reported when they're delivered?

  • I guess that answers my question [slashdot.org].

    For some reason I had heard that it wasn't happening this year. I'm excited that it is.

  • Maybe Summer of Code is too narrow? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2006, @03:48PM (#15132564)
    I realize that the program is called Summer of _Code_, but I think a lot of open source projects could benefit just as much from dedicated QA or documentation work [google.com]. I mean, I've seen a lot more people complain about gaim's instability than its lack of a "music messaging" [sourceforge.net] feature =P.
    • Interesting point. Gaim (or Glib 2.8, it doesn't matter to me) is incompatible with Glib 2.8 on Windows. This bug has existed for a long time and is extremely frustrating for developers who want to release software that uses Glib 2.8 on Windows.
    • One of the FreeBSD SoC[1] projects was a redesign of the website. Some HTML 'coding' was required, but no serious hacking. There's no requirement that the SoC projects have to be deep coding.

      [1] By the way, I really hate that acronym. Too much confusion with System on Chip.

  • A bit distasteful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Umbral Blot (737704) on Friday April 14 2006, @03:55PM (#15132606) Homepage
    I think the Summer of Code is a good idea in principle, but what I find a bit questionable is how heavily Linux oriented it is. There are open source devlopers who write for Windows (and Mac, and Amiga, ect) as their primary platform, and a great many CS students use Windows as their primary OS. I feel that the Summer of Code is slightly biased against them (at least the last one seemed to be).
    • How is programming on Linux any different from programming on Windows, Mac, etc? The APIs might be different, but that's just the grease, not the axle. And you've always got the standard library to fall back on.

    • Then Write a Proposal... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No offense, but if you think Windows (or Mac or Amiga or whatever) needs more representations, then I suggest you tell those CS students using Windows and open source developers for Windows to participate!

      Better yet, tell the Windows open source projects to offer to be mentors, and tell the CS students to apply. Heck, the two groups might even match up!

      Personally, I think the SoC 2005 participants included a great number of platform-agnostic projects. Web apps like Drupal, Gallery, XWiki, Java projects, Per
    • At least NetBSD and FreeBSD where mentors last year. I'm not even sure "Linux" was really a mentor.

  • Oh so close... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by masterzora (871343) <[masterzora] [at] [gmail.com]> on Friday April 14 2006, @03:56PM (#15132614)
    This is something I was hoping to do. Certainly better pay and more fun than my current job! Unfortunately, I fall short on a _single_ eligibility requirement: age.

    Oh well, there's always next year.

  • If you think about applying... (Score:5, Informative)

    by shalunov (149369) on Friday April 14 2006, @03:59PM (#15132640) Homepage
    ...please take a look at my little piece on grading proposals Summer of Code 2005 [internet2.edu] written after the students who made it were selected.

  • Winter of code? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by miro f (944325)
    The summer of code would be great if it was actually on during the summer, and I didn't have university to worry about.

    damn Aussie seasons

    I don't suppose there's any chance of a Google "Winter of Code"
  • Wow, that's weird. I just sent in a request yesterday asking if I could work on something for a thesis paper. Now, less than 24 hours later... Nice of them to create the program after I sent the mail yesterday... Grin

  • Dunno if you're still checking this ChrisD, but you have a small typo in your terms of service just before the word "Iran".

    Forgive my pedantry.

    • It seems that the mono project had better results: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Apr-13.html [tirania.org]
      • 3 projects never completed (QNX, CIL C++ extensions, XSLT compiler).
      • 2 projects half-done, and the resulting code is not very useful (Ruby.NET and GCC CIL).
      • 11 projects that were completed to our satisfaction (Cecil/write support, MSBuild implementation, ASP.NET GUI designer, bug finder, XAML Compiler, Diva Video Editor, PHP Compiler for .NET, Monodoc improvements, Windows.Forms' DataGridView and JScript
    • Was the point to produce full-fledged software or to give students a chance to learn more? If google wanted finished and functional software, I'm sure they'd hire the experts to get it done in time. The point of the summer of code is to grant computer science students the opportunity to do something in their field for a summer job instead of flipping burgers.

      So before you call the Summer of Code a failure, question what the student workers _learned_ instead of how many stable releases they built.

    • Nmap project was a great success (Score:5, Informative)

      by fv (95460) * <fyodor@insecure.org> on Friday April 14 2006, @05:43PM (#15133184) Homepage

      What will GOOG do to stop the same outright shambles this time round?

      The page [mozillazine.org] you linked to says nothing about outright shambles. He specifically says "I don't want this post to be seen as bashing either SoCcers or mentors". The page offers some excellent comments and suggestions for 2006, and I'm glad to see that Google is listening (Chris responded in the comments). Some of the suggestions are also meant for us mentors. The Nmap project [insecure.org] is proud to have been invited to participate in SoC again for 2006, and we are looking forward to it!

      You can call it "outright shambles" if you want, but all the emails I have from participants talking about how much they learned and enjoyed the program speak otherwise. And was it valuable to the Nmap project too? Take a look at their efforts and decide for yourself:

      • Doug Hoyte nearly tripled the size of the version detection database, and added OS/device type/hostname detection using the version detection DB. He made numerous other improvements as well.
      • Zhao Lei added more than 350 OS detection fingerprints to Nmap, bringing the total to 1684. He also helped design a 2nd generation OS detection (stack fingerprinting) system [seclists.org].
      • Adriano Monteiro designed and implemented an advanced Nmap GUI and results viewer named UMIT [sourceforge.net] (screenshots [sourceforge.net]).
      • Ole Morten Grodaas designed and implemented another advanced Nmap GUI and results viewer (its nice to have choices in open source!) named NmapGUI. Details and download here [seclists.org])
      • Chris Gibson has written a sweet little network tool named Ncat [seclists.org], which takes the venerable Netcat in an interesting and extremely useful direction with features such as connection brokering, socks proxying, and much more.
      • Paul Tarjan added the runtime interaction [insecure.org] feature to Nmap. While Nmap is running, you can now press 'v' to increase verbosity, 'd' to increase the debugging level, 'p' to enable packet tracing, or the capital versions (V,D,P) to do the opposite. Any other key (such as enter) will print out a status message giving the estimated time until scan completion.

      They did much more -- these are just some of the highlights. So I, for one, am looking forward to continuing these outright shambles again this year! But at the same time, there is always room for improvements . So I appreciate Gerv's constructive criticism.

      -Fyodor [insecure.org]

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