Summer of Code'08 Organizations List Announced 48
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.'"
Google supports FOSS Gaming! (Score:5, Informative)
Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.
The following game projects have been accepted,
The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec [thousandparsec.net] and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 [google.com] helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.
This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).
Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final [thousandparsec.net] evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.
One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset [thousandparsec.net], is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.
The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code [ohloh.net], more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a ruleset editor [thousandparsec.net] which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the future.
As well, the Open Source Office funded one student [thousandparsec.net] in a Summer of Code style outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope the code will soon be rolled out.
Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage with educational instit
Scribus Team's Ideas (Score:5, Informative)
Alex
Scribus Team's GSoC Administrator
Re:My observations (Score:4, Informative)
It gives 6 points: have you participated before, your ideas list, the quality of your application, does google use your software, does google know you, and does giving you money help the wider Open Source community.
BRL-CAD solid modeling and computer graphics (Score:4, Informative)
BRL-CAD [brlcad.org] is delighted to be participating in the Google Summer of Code this year for the first time. Be sure to check out our ideas list [brlcad.org] and either stop by the #brlcad IRC channel on Freenode or subscribe to our developer's mailing list [sourceforge.net] to get involved early.
As many know, computer-aided design (CAD) is one of the areas most lacking attention in open source. BRL-CAD has a solid foundation and considerable 25-year development history with more than 450 person-years development effort invested yet we are still wholesomely lacking in the usability and user-interface department. Maybe some of you can help us fix that. We're interested in many other ideas [brlcad.org] as well. Hope to see you apply!
x264 is accepting SoC applications! (Score:5, Informative)
Drop by #x264dev on Freenode and get involved in the qualification tasks before its too late... more information can be found here [videolan.org].
Re:Great program (Score:-1, Informative)
Pity, I guess it's just like with how OpenBSD would not go SMP, and then suddenly did, or how it wouldn't make an official organization for companies to donate to, instead making cheques out to "Theo," or, "CASH," then suddenly, the OpenBSD Foundation, maybe 2010's SoC will suddenly see OpenBSD on the radar.
Good luck with the project, Fyodor.
Re:Experience necessary? (Score:3, Informative)
Just because you know PHP, It doesnt mean you're going to know the ins and outs of how NextGen Gallery works, You need to know PHP & you need to know how Gallery code is structured(and the functions, and how to interface them, etc).
Thats not to say that you wouldnt pick up the way Gallerys code works easily(Just a note here, I've never looked at Galleries code, it cant be that complicated, i'm just using it as a example), but knowing how the code works beforehand is a great bonus.
I know basic C++, Java, VB/C.Net, so much that i can do simple stuff in them, and might even manage to write a decent small program, But i've got nowhere near enough experience with the languages to work with a organisation who has such code.
Take WordPress as another example, Knowing the way it works, how posts are published, how to use actions and filters, is a great bonus. If you only know basic PHP, and dont understand actions and filters and whatnot, it could be harder to complete the project than what its worth.
However, Keep in mind, that not all summer of code projects require programming, Documentation, Usability studies, Social bug tracking(whatever that is), could be equally as good projects, they dont require programming skills, just other types of skills.
Re:Google supports FOSS Gaming! (Score:3, Informative)
-BZA
Re:Google open source apps (Score:3, Informative)
"networking code"? They use the stock Linux network stack just like the rest of us (actually a pretty old version of it on most of their machines), and I'm kind of baffled that you'd think that networking code is where Google would be doing interesting work. Networking is a solved problem. It's what you do with the network that interesting, and where Google is spending their money and time.
But, since you haven't bothered to actually, you know...look at their Open Source projects website, I'll mention that Google does have a reasonable stable of open source projects that they've released...a million lines or so of it, apparently. http://code.google.com/hosting/projects.html [google.com]
They are heavy users of MySQL, and I know that they've paid for quite a bit of MySQL development work. And they employ too many OSS project developers to count.
Take your GPL defensiveness somewhere where it's useful. Google is a pretty good member of the OSS community...you wouldn't want us to start demanding that you start working on Open Source projects right away just because you use gThumb to organize your porn, would you?
Re:My observations (Score:3, Informative)
That's just silly. My project (Mercurial) is tiny (in terms of number of developers), we hadn't participated before, and we sure didn't have difficulty levels for each idea in our list. In fact, someone (me) just spent a few hours or so setting up a page with some ideas of things we haven't gotten to yet, trolling around for developers to become mentors and then I filed the application (and okay, I did spend some time thinking about my answers to their questions). All in all, it was maybe 8 to 10 hours work (and we never participated before, otherwise it would have been a little easier).
I was also in the channel at the time of the feedback session, and it sounded to me like they were doing the best they can to make it a fair process. Having about half of the organizations be projects that participated before sounds like it makes perfect sense to me: for one thing, some projects just play a big role and have large impact, so it's good if they get a bunch of students to help out. For the other, having a successful track record seems like it should be a differentiator in the selection process.
I particularly liked the part where people who were involved with the project they were deciding on were sent out of the room for the decision, and the part where projects who tried to get in by sending some extra email to the OSS group at Google or tried capitalizing on their personal connections where declined for participation, just to try and keep it fair. Also, the fact that they provided *personal feedback* to any person from a rejected project who asked! (This was done in order of timezone, to help people get some sleep... If that's not considerate, I don't know what is.)