Summer of Code Org Application Deadline Approaches

chrisd writes "Just wanted to drop a line reminding open source projects that they only have until March 12th (Pacific time) to apply for Google's Summer of Code. We are accepting more organizations this year than last because we want to add a couple hundred more students to the program. If you are part of a great project or know someone who is, we'd love to see an application. Please note that this is for organizations and not for prospective students, that's not for a few more weeks (see the program timeline)!"

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Re:Google redeems itself

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a recruitment/marketing tool. We have nothing to be grateful for.

Re:Google redeems itself

[yurivr]

There is no shortage of people rushing to work for google. Regardless, is it not clear that people who could care less about google will benefit from the source code this generates? You will find alot of this code implemented one way or the other in modern *NIX distributions. A smart, "everybody that's not a bastard wins" move.

How many SoC "news" do we have to get?

[microbee]

So we had an early heads-up [slashdot.org] one month ago, and then an announcement [slashdot.org] less than 2 weeks ago.

What's next? Do we need a cron job to submit the same Google news every other week now? Or can we get SOME valuable news here?

Re:newbie suitable

[Enleth]

IF you can't code, you'd better not take up the coding tasks - but there are tasks that require other skills, too. Of particular use is documentation writing, something that OSS programmers often dismiss as unimportant and boring or just because they don't have the "feel" for writing decent manuals. If you can express complicated ideas in a simple way, explain them clearly and make sense out of contorted processes in general, try your skills in this area, it certainly will help some user as much as a new feature in his favourite application.

Why not be grateful?

[bigsmoke]

Why? Are you not supposed to be grateful for anything that anyone does (partly) in their own interest?

Anyway, just wanted an opportunity to say that, as a frequent user of free software, I myself am very grateful for these annual contributions to the open source community.

Google Earth?

[sentientbrendan]

So, you're complaining that a software company that gives away it's software and services for free, doesn't also give away it's code for free? Remind me to never give you a Christmas present.

Do you know what the phrase "undeserved sense of entitlement" means?

What worries me about these projects

[sentientbrendan]

is that the students go away after the code is submitted, when a large software project really needs someone who understands the code to stick around and maintain it.

I've seen a lot of summer of code projects that look really cool, but then you never see the feature ending up in the final product.

I think the summer of code thing is a good idea in that it gets students involved in the open source community, but I hope that the projects spend some time thinking about who will maintain the code after the kid is back in school, and I suspect that doesn't happen.