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Google's Summer of Code Over 171

Posted by Zonk from the put-down-your-pencils dept.
yootje writes "The Summer of Code ('Google's program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development.') is now over. The result: 410 participants helping 38 projects suchs as Apache, KDE and FreeBSD. 'Among the project awards are both complex and simple innovations spanning the width and breadth of everything that the open source world has to offer. There are projects dealing with security, networking, VoIP, Java, mono, IP-PBX, online picture galleries, instant messaging and content management. There is even a game that Google's summer internship helped to pay for.'" Update: 09/11 17:15 GMT by Z : Added the story link at submittor's request.
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Google's Summer of Code Over More

Google's Summer of Code Over

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  • awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xintegerx ( 557455 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:28AM (#13532022) Homepage
    This is awesome! There is nothing like the highest worth technology company paying students to work their ass off in the summer to make and improve products and open source software in the name of Google.
    • hooray... Well, it's a good idea... maybe they should have kept it GOING... for... a long time...

    • Re:awesome! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:06PM (#13532275)
      This is nothing more than a shot across Microsoft's bow. They are warning them that they are ready to make a big play in open source and also have managed to basically, buy the hearts and minds of nearly every single FOSS developer for merely $2million - an absolute bargain.

      Google still isn't that open source friendly. Sure, they use Linux for servers but that's simply because there is little competition in the market for 100,000 PC 'clusters' with zero license fees.

      Where is Google Desktop Search for Linux? Where is an official Google Talk client for Linux (yes, I know about Jabber, but it doesn't integrate with your gmail contact list)? Where is the Gmail notifier for Linux?

      Until that changes, I don't really think that you can consider Google anything more than an open source user, not a contributor.

      Finally, Google knows that open source is a huge catalyst. For the $5,000/student they paid it would of probably cost Microsoft $50,000+ to do the same work. That basically means that for every million dollars Google puts in, they cost Microsoft $10million. It's a bit like the CIA funding the mujahadeen to fight the soviets, it probably cost them $1 to inflict $10,000 worth of damage onto the soviet economy (eg a $10,000 stinger missile launcher taking down a $10,000,000 helicopter).
      • Googling (of course) the last one turns up 3-4 third-party notifiers in the first set of results.

        I'm not personally concerned with gmail contact list integration, but if I was, I'd want to see it in gaim.

      • Re:awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by NetRAVEN5000 ( 905777 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:59PM (#13532881) Homepage
        "Google still isn't that open source friendly. Sure, they use Linux for servers but that's simply because there is little competition in the market for 100,000 PC 'clusters' with zero license fees."

        No. The reason Google uses Linux is simply because they always have. Even since before they called it "Google" it's run off of Linux servers because they couldn't afford anything else.

        "Where is Google Desktop Search for Linux? Where is an official Google Talk client for Linux (yes, I know about Jabber, but it doesn't integrate with your gmail contact list)? Where is the Gmail notifier for Linux?"

        The reason we don't have any of these is because they're in touch with the OS community. Where's Google Desktop Search for Linux? I don't care, and from what I've seen and heard in the Linux community, no one else using Linux does either. We keep track of our files, and if we really need it, we've got Beagle and KFind. Same for these other programs. EVERY distro already comes with either Kopete or GAIM, both of which can handle AIM/ICQ, Jabber, MSN, and other chat protocols. And as for the GMail notifier. . . all it is, is an aggregator that retrieves an RSS feed from Google. If you really want your "GMail Notifier" you can set up Firefox, Konqueror, or Kontact - or any other program that can handle RSS feeds - for the same function. Since you'll likely be using these programs anyway, why would you want another program?

        "Until that changes, I don't really think that you can consider Google anything more than an open source user, not a contributor."

        You can't be serious. Even with the 400+ programmers they just brought into the open-source community, many of whom may have otherwise never even TOUCHED open-source software?

        Google does plenty for the Linux community. It may not seem like much to you, but it really is - they open-source LOTS of code, and they're even using Qt (the basis for KDE) for Google Earth (even on the Windows verson! And I hear they're going to make Linux and Mac versions!) Not only are they spreading code, but they're spreading word about the beauties of open-source. That's a lot more than MS ever did - and back in the mid-90's, Hotmail ran completely off of open-source software (yes, they bought it off someone else, but still, it ran open-source software for a while when it was in MS's possession).

        If you're trying to point out the fact that Google is using open-source to their advantage, so what? We'd be writing code with or without Google. I'm glad they support us, it's more than most people do. Plus, whether they profit or not from open-source, they ARE giving back to the OS community by open-sourcing their own code and, with "Summer of Code", bringing new people into the open-source programming community. And they're helping Mozilla out, too, by making GMail fully compatible with Firefox and Mozilla (instead of making it work only on IE, like many sites do) and hosting Firefox's start-up page.

        Like I said, these may all seem like small things to you, but that's what the open-source community is like. Everyone contributes in their own way - whether it's contributing code, spreading the word about open-source, or contributing ideas - and, while each individual contribution may not be much, all of these contributions together work make a HUGE difference.

        • Re:awesome! (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          they're even using Qt (the basis for KDE) for Google Earth (even on the Windows verson! And I hear they're going to make Linux and Mac versions!)

          Yes, that makes them a user of open source, as the grandparent was saying. If they contributed changes back to TrollTech, they would be contributing.

          back in the mid-90's, Hotmail ran completely off of open-source software (yes, they bought it off someone else, but still, it ran open-source software for a while when it was in MS's possession).

          Which was a cont

        • Since you'll likely be using these programs anyway, why would you want another program?

          I'm sure the parent knew there was alternatives, what he was saying is that Google focus on Windows apps. What alternatives you have is totally besides the point here. Just because Microsoft Office doesn't exist for Linux, doesn't excuse Microsoft just because OpenOffice exist as an alternative.

          • Re:awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)

            by NetRAVEN5000 ( 905777 )
            No, what alternatives you have ISN'T beside the point. MS is completely exempt from making MS Office for Linux because no one would want it - people switch to Linux to get away from MS products (this is why they stopped making IE for Unix/Linux - it sucks, and no Linux user would want to use it). Likewise, Google is exempt from making Linux versions of some of their products because Linux already has more powerful programs that do the same thing - and then some - and are already in your distro and that yo
            • IE for Linux? It never existed. It did exist on Unix and they did stop making it.. but it was never made available on Linux.
            • MS is completely exempt from making MS Office for Linux because no one would want it - people switch to Linux to get away from MS products
              The fact that people do buy CrossOver Office licenses, or even use WINE, suggests otherwise.

        • Re:awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)

          by rbaf ( 785460 )
          Open source != developing apps for Linux.
          • I want to see their current windows apps to be open source.
          • I want to see GFS to be open source.
          • If they're really developing a browser or whatever OSish thing, I want it to be 100% open source :-)

          This is not to say what they've done is without merit, of course it is a good thing, but if we're going to talk about Google offering open source products, they could be doing it already, and instead, they're quite secretive with almost everything they do (which ag

        • Yeah! What he said! :-)


      • Finally, Google knows that open source is a huge catalyst. For the $5,000/student they paid it would of probably cost Microsoft $50,000+ to do the same work. That basically means that for every million dollars Google puts in, they cost Microsoft $10million. It's a bit like the CIA funding the mujahadeen to fight the soviets, it probably cost them $1 to inflict $10,000 worth of damage onto the soviet economy (eg a $10,000 stinger missile launcher taking down a $10,000,000 helicopter).

        Not really. While certai
        • but in 3 years when those college students are full time employees at a large corporation, odds are they will still be working on and contributing back to those Open Source projects and others.

          I know a *huge* hurdle in getting developers started contributing is actually finding a (non-dead) project they could contribute to successfully with a minimal learning curve. Since this summer of work thing was basically payning the students for thier learning curve, they should be making contributions for a long whi

      • Re:awesome! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by laurensv ( 601085 )
        OT, but still;
        " It's a bit like the CIA funding the mujahadeen to fight the soviets, it probably cost them $1 to inflict $10,000 worth of damage onto the soviet economy."
        That strategy did backfire upon the USA and did much more harm in the end.
        • Well, the companies who were selling the weapons to the mujahadeen thru the CIA are doing gangbusters now. So, it might have backfired on the USA as a whole, I think it worked out for some people just fine...

    • Re:awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Google giving $4500 to each student is pretty darn good. When I was in school, it would have paid an awful lot of bills. Also, the projects are all sorts of open source projects...Asterisk, apache, whatever. What are you complaining about?

      • Re:awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by cide1 ( 126814 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:14PM (#13532641) Homepage
        Not to be picky, but $4500 for a summer of work isn't pretty darn good. Most companies factor a summer as 12 weeks * 40 hrs/week = 480 hours. This is $9.37 / hour pretax. If the students were going to do the projects anyways, out of the goodness of their hearts, than this was a nice gesture, but it is not the same as an internship where the pay is normally twice that of google, and an internship which will have mentoring and allow a student to learn a companies culture.

        • Re:awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Vann_v2 ( 213760 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @02:14PM (#13532957) Homepage
          He's right. There were two big problems for me with Google's summer of code. The first was that they announced it well after most major summer internship deadlines. Even if I had wanted to do it I was already committed to doing an REU. The second was the pay. $4500 for the entire summer? Give me a break. Most REUs pay better than that per-hour and include room and board.

          Personally, I did an REU for the first 8 weeks of summer, which paid two thirds the amount Google was paying. The remainder of the summer I work full time and by the end I'll have made significantly more than Google's $4500, plus I'll have learned a lot of research-level mathematics. Most of the Summer of Code projects seemed to be plain BORING. Never mind that $4500 for someone in rural Iowa will go a lot farther than $4500 for someone living in San Francisco -- cost of living doesn't figure into Summer of Code anywhere, while it does for typical summer research or internship opportunities.

          I'm glad Google did this because it will help out a lot of projects, but the only way Summer of Code is compelling to a college student is if they've already exhausted other avenues.

          • Re:awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)

            by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
            You are missing one important thing:

            SoC students got to work on what they wanted.

            I was lucky in my summer placement in that they grossly underestimated my abilities and so I was able to finish the work they had set for me in the first week, and I then got to spend the next 9 weeks playing with any bit of the project I wanted. Other people I've talked to were less lucky, and ended up doing little more than data entry and uninspiring grunt-work coding.

            • Well, any smart student will apply for summer research or internship opportunities in a subject they enjoy. I also got to research what I wanted during the summer, plus I had direction from people who were at the top of the fields in which I was interested.

              To me that sounds a lot more compelling than, say, being mentored by a Gaim developer writing code to implement ICQ file transfer.
          • In my day, interns didn't get paid. If you got paid, it was called "a job."
            • There are plenty of unpaid internships to go around, still. What I did over the summer wasn't an internship per se, it was a program funded by the NSF which allowed the university at which I was studying to give me a stipend. There are many summer opportunities like this, though of course they tend to be more competitive.
          • I worked my way through college as a motel night auditor (so I could do homework on the job). $4,500 was a lot more than I'd earn during summer break, and I'd actually enjoy the work I was doing. While I can see your point, understand that the Summer Of Code would be a huge step up for many would-be contributors.
            • If a college student today had the skills necessary to do the Summer of Code he probably has the skills necessary to find a much better paying job, even if just over the summer. If he also has good grades it wouldn't be impossible for him to find a paid internship or paid research opportunity, either.

              Like I said, if someone has exhausted these opportunities, then yes, Summer of Code is compelling. If not, well, he'd be stupid not to look elsewhere first.
              • If a college student today had the skills necessary to do the Summer of Code he probably has the skills necessary to find a much better paying job, even if just over the summer.

                Get over yourself. Some (many) students don't want to leave their regular jobs over the summer for whatever reason. I didn't, although I certainly could have.

        • Re:awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by MourningBlade ( 182180 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @02:31PM (#13533041) Homepage

          Depends on where you live. Here in Oklahoma, $9.37/hr is pretty damn nice for a summer student internship.

          NYC it's not so hot.

          Also, given the nature of the project, it was possible to hold down a part-time job while working on it. So you're not comparing apples to apples.

          That "12 weeks * 40 hrs/week = 480 hours" would be with an office space they'd expect you to be in for those 40 hours.

        • Re:awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @07:14PM (#13534317) Journal
          For a college student 9.37/hr is a ton of money.

          Even for underemployed former IT workers doing call center jobs for 10/hr (like where I work) is considered alot of money.

          This isn't 1999 anymore folks. IT is viewed as a cost center and perhaps maintance rather than long term investments if your lucky.

          Still it looks good on your resume and if I had more software programing experience I would be jumping over doing google's summer coding. $4500 is still money and my resume will look very very good and its a free advertisement to employers.

        • Re:awesome! (Score:3, Informative)

          by be-fan ( 61476 )
          I think the flexibility that came with the SoC counts for a lot. Numerically, the SoC was a fairly significant pay-cut for me. I would have made almost 3x as much if I had taken my regular summer job (60 hour work-weeks add up quite quickly...). On the other hand, with the SoC, I had a lot of flexibility in my schedule, and more importantly, I was able to choose my own project. That in and of itself is worth the difference, at least for one summer. Let's face it --- it's very hard to get paid working on Lis

      • Re:awesome! NOT! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ivoras ( 455934 )
        (I'm one of the "SoC students") There are couple more problems:

        - That's $4500 before taxes. Where I live at least jobs and services are usually negotiated with after-taxes sums, so I was disappointed that I had to give up 30% of the sum.

        - I'm not the only one that hasn't received even the so-called "initial" payment ($500 - 30%) even after it's been more than a week since the project ended

        - Not a single deadline Google set for themselves was honoured. Not for announcements, forms, nor payment.

        Organiza

        • I can understand being pissed off if you needed the $500 to cover incidentials, but other than that, I think Chris and crew did a good job given their circumstances. It's not easy to organize something like this (the ITIN stuff alone must've caused at least a couple of ulcers), and it's their first time doing it. Not to mention the fact that they have regular jobs to attend to as well.

          IMHO, a lot of the SoC participants came off as overly demanding and self-righteous, kinda like you. The mailing lists were
    • If it were any other company but Googe would we hear about this. /. continues to slide in relevance!
    • There are projects dealing with security, networking, VoIP, Java, mono
      There is nothing like the highest worth technology company paying students to work their ass off in the summer to make and improve products and open source software in the name of Google.

      Not to mention health education teaching our young programmers about mono [wikipedia.org] ;) i for one am one of those 5%ers who have never gotten mono (and likely never will)

  • Summer's over? (Score:5, Funny)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:31AM (#13532056)
    You mean the Summer of Code doesn't last forever?! It went by so fast...

    • Re:Summer's over? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You mean the Summer of Code doesn't last forever?! It went by so fast...
      Is "Summer of Code" supposed to be like the "Summer of Love" back in the 60's? For most geeks that would last less than 30 seconds.

    • Re:Summer's over? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Gothic_Walrus ( 692125 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:10PM (#13532298) Journal
      I got my first compiler
      Got it from the Google guys
      Tried to give Gaim file transfers
      It was the summer of two-oh-five

      Me and some guys from school
      Worked all night we tried real hard
      Jimmy quit and we never finished coding
      I shoulda known we'd never get far

      Oh when I look back now
      That summer seemed to last forever
      And if I had the choice
      Ya - I'd always wanna be there
      Those were the best days of my life...

    • Re:Summer's over? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:09PM (#13532615)
      To be followed by the "Bleak Winter of QA".

      I jest, but in some respects, it seems like a couple months of student hacking could do harm as well as good. It's not exactly condusive to good development practices.

  • Dang. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mikhailov ( 894603 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:33AM (#13532066)
    I wish I could have went, maybe they'll hold it this summer before I take the Visual Basic and A+ certification classes.

    • Re:Dang. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You have to be a student of an accredited school to do this.

    • Re:Dang. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by laffer1 ( 701823 )
      No see they didn't take most of the applicants.. you would not have done any work. The rejection was even delayed by 9 hours!

      Visual Basic .NET might have worked if they had mono in there but of course mono barely supports VB. Novell doesn't get that many people know VB.

      My project idea was for the FreeBSD project. My wife was also rejected with her ideas for the KDE Kate text editor.

      What i'd like to know is how many people actually got paid. The projects got money up front but the individuals had to code

  • Where is the story? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hritcu ( 871613 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:34AM (#13532075) Homepage
    When I saw the subject I was really expecting to see some analysis, some statistics, at least a list of projects. Well ... where are all these things? The only reference in the article is to the official Summer of Code page [google.com], and that has been unchanged for weeks. So I have ask: where is the story?

    • Re:Where is the story? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jgaynor ( 205453 ) <jon@gaAUDENynor.org minus poet> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:37AM (#13532092) Homepage
      Amen. I've had a problem with this since they announced it - such a great idea but no content on their site re: the actual work. They should have paid someone $4500 to maintain their summer of code page!
      • Come on. My rant had nothing to do with Google. They did a very good job already, and they will release the results, when they are ready to do so. The actual coding phase has finished two weeks ago, so this is old stuff. I think that the eveluation process (by the mentors) is also ready, or almost ready, so we can expect a Google anouncement sometime soon. Now, there is simply, very little to see.

      • Nmap Project Results (Score:5, Informative)

        by fv ( 95460 ) * <fyodor@insecure.org> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @03:52PM (#13533422) Homepage
        such a great idea but no content on their site re: the actual work. They should have paid someone $4500 to maintain their summer of code page!

        Yeah, for a $2 million dollar project it was ridiculously understaffed on the Google side. But Googlers like Chris DiBona and Greg Stein worked extraordinarily hard to keep things flowing relatively smoothly. So it still turned out to be a huge success for Nmap [insecure.org] and most/all of the other participating projects. Thanks, Chris and Greg!

        So what did we (Nmap project) accomplish in those two months? The sponsored students and their credentials/projects are listed here [seclists.org]. Much of their work can be found in Nmap 3.90, which was released [seclists.org] on Thursday. SoC changes include:

        • Doug Hoyte nearly tripled the size of the version detection database, 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 http://sourceforge.net/projects/umit [sourceforge.net]">UMIT (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.

        It has been a crazy two months, but I'm very pleased to see so much accomplished! If you're using an older version of Nmap, you really should consider upgrading to 3.90 [insecure.org] to see the difference.

        Cheers,
        Fyodor

        • Re:Nmap Project Results (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jgaynor ( 205453 ) <jon@gaAUDENynor.org minus poet> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @05:43PM (#13533918) Homepage
          Two points here -

          1. Holy shit. wow. The above list just goes to show how much work can be involved in maintaing a tool which im sure many administrators take for granted and assume is more or less static.

          2. This is exactly the kind of summary each project needs. A list of developers and features (or at least a link to the relevant changelogs) and the version number (or future version number) we can see those changes in.

    • Re:Where is the story? (Score:5, Informative)

      by yootje ( 770109 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:38AM (#13532097) Homepage
      LOL, I forgot to put my source in it: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 547611 [internetnews.com] Slashdot editors, please put it in the story?

      • Re:Where is the story? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hritcu ( 871613 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:58AM (#13532229) Homepage
        The article is interesting, and I really have to agree with the ending phrase:

        "Quite frankly, I don't know how Google will use the projects' results," Macieira said. "I hope they use it to promote free/open software and show that there is a healthy relation between the corporate world and the free software developers."

        I know that there will be enough of you trying to find a hidden (evil) reason for Google's action, but it is simply not the case. Google has very many benefits from open source, and now that they have the power to help back, they are actually doing it. Thank you Google.
        • My opinion is that Google is doing this to promote (improve) FOSS and Linux. It gives them a good opportunity to scout talent and also improve the only other real alternative to Microsoft products. If Ballmer ever does try to kill Google they could fight back by expanding this program.
        • Well, this isn't entirely altruistic, but then I'm distrustful of altruism. Google benefit because for a small investment they body of Free Software is improved. They can then skim these and use them as foundations for more of their own products. They also win because they gain good PR in the Free Software community. The projects benefit, because they receive funding and code. The students benefit, because they receive funding and mentoring. The world benefits because there is more Free Software avail
          • Google benefit because for a small investment they body of Free Software is improved. They can then skim these and use them as foundations for more of their own products.

            2.000.000$ is not that small. And the improvements for free software as a whole will not be drastic, maybe not even visible. It's only 400+ students working for 2 months each. That is 66 programer-years scatered around 38 unrelated open source projects. That is an average 1.74 programmer-years per organization, which is not that much if
        • I know that there will be enough of you trying to find a hidden (evil) reason for Google's action, but it is simply not the case.

          Wow. It's great that we've got people like you to think critically for the rest of us. God forbid we come to our own conclusion!
    • Even more interesting will be what happens in subsequent years. If it's not just a veiled early-ante-prior-pre-interview, its effects could snowball and lead to much weeping and gnashing of teeth in Redmond.

  • Google sucks (Score:5, Funny)

    by gabecubbage ( 711618 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:35AM (#13532081)
    They rejected my application to write a search engine driven by sites linking in. It could've been huge!

  • Lots of great projects (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sznupi ( 719324 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:46AM (#13532154) Homepage
    I see some fun and very usefull stuff that came out of it. Too bad my favourite project from GAIM camp didn't turn out much... Crazy Chat is a lovely idea IMHO...enhancing communication via IM to include emotional messages presented usually by webcam, but without the bandwith (and difficulties of transmitting video) overhead. (Matrox tried somthing similar with their Headcasting, but it was useless IMO - it merely guessed how the animated face on the other end should look like based on voice, but this didn't add any additional information to communication, like Crazy Chat would, by "scanning", transmitting and displaying on animated, cartoony head, real emotional responces) I wonder if someone else would pick up the idea...

  • One Google Clapping (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @11:56AM (#13532207) Homepage Journal
    How "open" is the "Summer of Code" when there are no links to the projects? I've been looking for these projects, from which Google is getting the best PR since their IPO, since they started. Where are they? If source is released in a forest, and there's no one to read it, is it really open?
    • Every one of the mentoring organizations has one or more pages dedicated to the event. You can surelly find the different projects there. As of this time Google made no official announcement regarding the results of the event, and I am sure that when they will, there will be enough information about each project they sponsored. You just have to be patient :)
      • The "event" has lasted all Summer. Why not publish at least status of the projects? And I looked at the "mentoring organizations" page, which links only to the orgs' homepages, and their page of "ideas" projects which might have been candidates for the SoC. No readily available sign publications of the projects, which are now announced to be "concluded", which means the chance for the public to participate is over. Which would have been the point of an open project. Is Google trying to steal Netscape's iron
        • Google and all the mentors from their respective organizations are currently evaluating each project to decide which ones have reached the initial expectations. After this is done (which can last until the end of September), Google will publish a complete list of all successful projects (or at least this is what I've heard).

          Anyway, from NetBSD [netbsd.org]'s side, check out the NetBSD-SoC [sourceforge.net] page where you can find information and code about all accepted projects.

        • Re:One Google Clapping (Score:4, Informative)

          by hritcu ( 871613 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:47PM (#13532487) Homepage
          The "event" has lasted all Summer. Why not publish at least status of the projects?
          Because Google didn't know the status of the projects, at least not for the 400 projects not mentored by Google. That was the whole idea of having mentoring organizations: Google didn't have the resources to look after each of the 400+ students. However some students, and some mentoring organizations have made the status available to anybody (for example by spliting everything into tiny tasks and tracking them using JIRA) but nobody was forced to do so. Two months is very little time to finish a project, and most of the chosen projects were very ambitious. So my guess is that rather then providing status on the progress for the rest of the world, the students and mentors focused on developing software.

          Why are you so sure the projects can be found, that Google will make the announcement?
          I'm just guessing. It just makes sense that when you invest so much money into sponsoring projects you will want the world to know that you did so, and that many of them were successful. Google could gain some more press coverage because of this. But I think that this was not the goal of the whole thing, and they might even skip it. I'm very currious about what they could tell, so I really hope they won't.
          • As required by professional project management, I'll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, it's clear that the "story" we're discussing is just an alarm going off in a Slashdot story submitter's calendar. Not any actual new development or announcement from Google. It's a premature story submission.

            However, there's no reason Google couldn't publish some status from these projects. That's what "open" means: not closed to outsiders. As OSS becomes mature, we realize there are degrees of openness. And "project t

      • I found it very hard to track what was going on, since despite it allegedly being about open development most of the work went on behind closed doors and then suddenly hit projects' CVS repositories a couple of weeks ago. In most cases I couldn't even find out what the projects were until they were checked in.

        I'm sure some cool stuff has come out of this, but I wish it had been run better. The stated purpose of all this was to get the young 'uns into open source. For me, a major part of open source develop

        • Actually, I think the "closed doors" are more that the individual SOC coders had more to worry about than keeping a web site up to date.

          Yes, more status updates would be nice, but really, give it time, folks.
        • I found it very hard to track what was going on, since despite it allegedly being about open development most of the work went on behind closed doors and then suddenly hit projects' CVS repositories a couple of weeks ago. In most cases I couldn't even find out what the projects were until they were checked in.

          I really don't think that this the way things happened, although it could be, because the whole thing lasted only two months so the last 2-3 weeks is actually, the last 30% of the time, and it is v
        • It seems to me that open-source has enough wannabe celebrities and unfinished projects already. If people spent their time on adding useful, complete features instead of on self-promotion, that doesn't seem like something to criticize them for.

  • Ended 10 Days Ago (Score:3, Informative)

    by DrIdiot ( 816113 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:09PM (#13532292)
    The "pencils down" for Google's Summer of Code was September 1st.

  • Journalling for BSD filesystems? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alwin Henseler ( 640539 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:36PM (#13532426)
    Checking out FreeBSD's ideas page, my eye was caught by this: "UFS Journaling: Add transaction journaling and playback to the UFS filesystem. The goal is to increase the reliability of the filesystem and greatly reduce the need for a full 'fsck' after a crash or power loss."

    If I'm not mistaken, all major BSD's (Free, Open, and Net) support a feature called 'soft updates'. Basically, re-ordering filesystem updates in such a way, that the filesystem remains in a consistent state, even in the event of a badly-timed crash or powerout. All this to avoid the need for a full fsck on reboot.

    Quote from the FreeBSD features page: "Soft Updates allows improved filesystem performance without sacrificing safety and reliability. It analyzes meta-data filesystem operations to avoid having to perform all of those operations synchronously. Instead, it maintains internal state about pending meta-data operations and uses this information to cache meta-data, rewrite meta-data operations to combine subsequent operations on the same files, and reorder meta-data operations so that they may be processed more efficiently. Features such as background filesystem checking and file system snapshots are built on the consistency and performance foundations of soft updates."

    From the NetBSD site: "Soft Updates permit metadata writes to be ordered to achieve close to asynchronous disk performance without risk of metadata corruption. This significantly improves the performance of FFS file systems."

    You might still do a full fsck later (as regular maintenance), perhaps even as background task, but it wouldn't be needed for a reliable restart.

    Journaling is another way to do this, by adding an extra 'log' of the latest updates to a filesystem. Then in the event of a crash, you don't need to check the entire filesystem, but can bring it back into a consistent state by 'replaying' those latest updates from the journal.

    Now here's what I don't understand: why add journalling to a filesystem, when you're already updating it in a 'crash-proof' manner (soft updates)? What's the point? Seems rather like a step back to me, with soft updates looking like a smarter way to archieve crash-proof filesystem handling.

    I assume that this soft updates feature is limited to certain OS/filesystem combo's. And maybe journaling provides some thing(s) that soft updates doesn't? Can some knowledgable BSD user shed some light on all this?

    -- This sig just wasted another 0.x seconds of your precious time. Supporting banning sigs!

  • Here's one Summer of Code project... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jim Buzbee ( 517 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:41PM (#13532454) Homepage
    Tsync [sourceforge.net] is a Summer of Code project. Looks cool...

  • The article forgot NetBSD (Score:5, Informative)

    by hubertf ( 124995 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:57PM (#13532548) Homepage Journal
    NetBSD got 7 slots assigned, see the NetBSD-SoC webpage [sf.net] for all the details. One of the projects (tmpfs) is already integrated into NetBSD, even.

    - Hubert

  • Any results? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shish ( 588640 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:04PM (#13532590) Homepage
    Projects I've been looking forward to:

    Apache Perchild MPM: Coder selected, can't find any code
    Apache mod-bandwidth-limit: 2 people have shown an interest, can't find any code
    Firefox bittorrent: Alpha 0.0.2
    Several gaim projects: One project has commited *something* to HEAD
    Several gnome projects: Can't find any news
    Several SVN projects: Can't find any news

    So has anything really changed?

  • Blenders Summer of Code projects (Score:5, Informative)

    by LetterRip ( 30937 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:34PM (#13532753)
    Here are SOC projects done for Blender,

    http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/Sum merOfCode2005 [blender.org]

    We had some really awesome projects happen (fluid simulation, high quality boolean tools, improved nurbs, 'Verse network integration, animation constraints improvements, and a drawing tool, alas two projects - ODE integration, and a live tutorial didn't happen).

    LetterRip

  • Perl Foundation (Score:4, Informative)

    by publius_ovidius ( 870895 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:42PM (#13532795) Homepage Journal

    For those who are curious, the Perl Foundation had 8 Summer of Code projects funded [perlfoundation.org]. They were a blast to work with.

  • Rejects (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was a reject. So while I was going to code through the summer anyway I decided to go on vacation to protest. WTF? Didn't like my project? Well, I *don't* have to do it then. Eventually I went free camping (many nudists, drinking and smoking joints) and got a new girlfriend. Ahh. Now its September. Well, back to work fellas!

  • She was part of the debate club back in highschool and was more of a political science nerd than a computer one.

    I am curious how the qualitive search works vs a quantitive? My guess is the difference deals with some heavy duty mathmatics.

    I assume all a database does is link tables and arrays of data together based on sort and index routines. How would the qualitiave work for a site such as okcupid.com?

    • Yep, that would be me. It's been a long strange trip, but eventually I ended up in the CS department at the University of Iowa [uiowa.edu].

      My Query By Example [pgfoundry.org] project uses a support vector machine (a type of machine learning algorithm) to learn classification rules based on the set of examples you specify. Those rules then get applied to the rest of the data points in whatever table you're looking at. So, yes, there's a lot of big nasty math -- at its core it's a quadratic programming problem. I didn't want to get int

      • Gotcha.

        I did some scripting when I was a jr admin years ago but have not really played with database programing other than basic sql.

        I would be the annoying guy named Tim with the short hair from your junior year at Kingwood High from debate.

        I eventually ended up in Florida where I sold my soul to the devil (err got employed at AOL) doing tech support, and take lovely calls such as these [slashdot.org].

        I am in school currently majoring in economics fulltime and minoring in CIS.

  • Its only just turned spring here!

  • Game? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Pixelmixer ( 907566 )
    What is the game they worked on? File searching, while being attacked by ravaging zombies that you have to search for their weakness by probing them with a google scanner. Then you attack them by searching for a weapon with your google auto-materializer that will materialize any weapon you can find in the google search database... how cool?!?

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