Highlights From the 2009 Google Summer of Code 72
mask.of.sanity writes "Over a 1000 students were accepted into the fifth year of the program from 70 countries and will work on about 150 open source projects with mentor organisations.
The program, created in 2005, has exposed some 2500 students to "real-world" software development and opened employment opportunities within mentor organisations and in fields relevant to their academic study.
The United States scored the lion's share with 212 accepted students; 101 from India; 55 from Germany; 44 from Canada, 43 from Brazil. The Dominican Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg and Nigeria were new entrants to the program each with a single accepted student.
Check out the slideshow summary of some project highlights, with hyperlinks back the detailed project pages."
Thanks Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Major kudos to Google for continuing to run the Summer of Code despite the hard economic times where most of silicon valley is cutting way back. Those 1000 students and 150+ open source communities represent more than a 5 million dollar investment this summer, which is not petty cash or an insignificant investment for *any* organization. The raw horsepower of the program itself (roughly and easily) represents more than 400 years of development "staff-years" going into open source software just over this summer with much more coming from those that stay involved with the open source communities and continue to contribute. Very cool.
It's a great symbiotic relationship. Google gets major attention, which is of course very important to their business model. The open source orgs get passionate and motivated developers, many that stay long after GSoC. The students get the experience of a lifetime, an introduction into a life-long relationship with open source and their ability to directly make a difference.
Glad to See GIMP is Participating (Score:3, Insightful)
But rather than coders focusing on a "fast adaptive resampler tailored for transformations which mostly downsample," they'd have been better served by a "Summer of Marketing" and maybe some kid could come up with a better name than "GIMP" or a logo better than that stupid weasel, or whatever the hell it is.
Re:[PASTE] / The stupidity of a slideshow w/ icons (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Aussies, Kiwis enter Google Summer of Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Glad to See GIMP is Participating (Score:4, Insightful)
interesting idea, not everyone's a coder after all.
Perhaps an Autumn of Documentation, followed by a Winter of Marketing, and a Spring of Sales.
Think how much goodness could be spread by some of the above!
Re:[PASTE] / The stupidity of a slideshow w/ icons (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this a useful paradigm these days? How many of these stupid slideshows have I clicked on, just to read something that could have been contained on a single non-scrolling web page?
It isn't. Web 2.0 is shit. Seriously. For every cool app (e.g. Google Streetview) or cool mashup there are tens of thousands of arduous, information obfuscating, time wasting and soul destroying websites that do nothing other than get in the way of what you're trying to do (e.g. book airline tickets) or trying to discover, while spamming you with useless graphics, animations, advertising, and generally teaching your eye to ignore almost everything displayed in your browser...and then hiding the bit of info you're looking for in the area of the screen your eye has trained itself to skip over because of so many ads previously.
Someone needs to develop a browser (or proxy) that downloads a web 2.0 site, disassembles the logic, deconstructs the page, and reconstructs it as a simple HTML page (with forms if necessary) so those of us not interested in spending our hours wading through visual SPAM can get something useful done before the sun expands into a red giant and envelops the Earth.