Summer of Code Student Application Deadline Looms

chrisd writes "Hi everyone, just wanted to do one last shake of the old tree...the Summer of Code student application deadline is coming up on the 26th. We've got some great applications but I'd love to see more. We're accepting 800 students this year into the program and we have 131 open source organizations who'd love to see you apply. Anyone can talk about open source but you could be coding some with some of the best developmers out there. Apply today." Just a note: the 26th is an extension of the previous deadline. If you thought you wouldn't have time, you now have until next Monday. Get crackin'.

Where is the bleeding edge?

[mangu]

I looked over the list of sponsors and it seemed to be mostly about mature projects.

I think that where we really need fresh ideas is in the field that has been in the experimental phase ever since computers were invented: artificial intelligence. It would be great to see Google's massive hardware resources applied to creating (or trying to create) stuff like an artificial consciousness.

Let the old guys do the incremental improvements, young programmers should spend one summer doing things no one has ever tried, or at least things they never heard about.

Re:Where is the bleeding edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Summer of Code is about little vignettes. Things that are well-defined and can be done and closed, leaving a nice taste in the mouth.

Something open-ended and nebulous like artificial consciousness is better suited for... postgrad work. Which students are also very welcome to apply for. As soon as they graduate :-)

Re:No Mythtv this year....

[am 2k]

The problem with SoC is that the participants are like (inexperienced) contractors to the project. All other devs on the projects are (usually) non-paid spare-time developer.

This means that the SoC students have to be treated differently, which some mentors didn't expect. Since they're inexperienced, they usually plan far more than they could ever achieve in the time frame, but some projects picked those first since they sounded best. They expected the students to complete their work after deadline, so they gave them a positive review, even though nothing was finished. Of course, nothing happend, since students are used to dropping everything after a course is done.

For example, take a look at the Haiku project's SoC ideas [haiku-os.org]. They didn't participate last year, so they haven't learnt that lesson yet. Most of these projects are like a large master's thesis, some even more! That's ridiculous, there's no way any SoC student would be able to do that in the given time frame.

When students try to work on a project that's far above their head, you can expect that they constantly talk to their mentors about how to do it.