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.'"
GNU ideas list (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is it possible... (Score:4, Interesting)
Some people are upset with the recent Google-Youtube-China [informationweek.com] situation. It's obviously not entirely Google's fault, but it's not a comfortable situation.
Lots of people think that Google has serious privacy problems [google-watch.org]. Not everyone thinks these are limited to its own data collection either--sometimes Google knows too much [reputation...erblog.com].
Some people think Google mis-manages its Adsense platform [here-n-there.com] and hurts small publishers.
And lots of people are upset about PageRank -- from those who get a zero PR for no clear reason, to sites that get dropped, to anti-hate groups that dislike it when pro-hate groups get high rankings.
I don't know if any of those are GOOD reasons to hate Google, but plenty of people DO.
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All those things I think are really weak arguments. I don't encourage any one to like|love|adore any company. But as far as reasons go to dislike a company, these are pretty weak ones -- for me at least.
Issue 1 : Google follows local law. It concerns me a lot more when companies think they are above local law.
Issue 2 and Issue 3: people make (and have) too much personal data available online (as far as I know Google is mining private DBs and making that data available). I am far more worried about the f
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My observations (Score:3, Interesting)
It's apparent that the main criteria used to determine who gets a mentor org slot is (1) the size of the organization, (2) whether an org participated in years past, and (3) the quality of the ideas list. (Yes, all three criteria were confirmed at one point or another during the afternoon.) By my count, more than half of the 2008 mentoring orgs participated in 2007. When asked how this can possibly inject innovation and new ideas into the OSS community, one Google staffer replied that it's all about the students, and larger orgs can mentor more students than can smaller orgs. As for the ideas list: We were rejected on a technicality in that we didn't specify the *difficulty level* for each idea in our list.
So what did I come away with? A process that rewards organizations that seem to already have the resources necessary to attract new developers, and a process that falls back on technicalities to determine, in part, who makes the short list and who doesn't.
As one Google sysop replied rather testily to someone, "it's *our* money, so we can do what we want." Don't know if I'll waste my time again next year, since we will only be able to surmount just one of the three most heavily-weighted criteria. But at least now, we have a good idea of what the selection process entails.
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.
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Oh really? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is not my experience at all.
The Comprehensive C Archive Network org (a port of CPAN to C) was accepted, despite it being essentially only two or three main people (mostly Rusty Russel and I) with a mailing list and an irc channel, and only existing for 3-4 months.
So we apparently got through on the strength of our idea alone.
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By my count, more than half of the 2008 mentoring orgs participated in 2007. When asked how this can possibly inject innovation and new ideas into the OSS community, one Google staffer replied that it's all about the students, and larger orgs can mentor more students than can smaller orgs. As for the ideas list: We were rejected on a technicality in that we didn't specify the *difficulty level* for each idea in our list.
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 wo
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
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Re:Google supports FOSS Gaming! (Score:4, Insightful)
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-BZA
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Great program (Score:5, Interesting)
The Nmap Security Scanner [nmap.org] project has now participated in Summer of Code all three years—and mentored 25 students. So I'm pleased that Google has accepted us for a fourth year. This really is a great program, so I hope many Slashdotters apply (or at least spread the word to your student friends who may be too busy with school to read Slashdot). There aren't many opportunities available to get paid to work on free software of your choice. Your work makes a big difference for projects and their users as well. You can read about the successful Nmap SoC students in 2007 [seclists.org], 2006 [seclists.org], and 2005 [slashdot.org]. No Nmap user can read those lists without recognizing features and improvements they use.
Of course part of the purpose of this post is to shamelessly plug the Nmap SoC ideas page [nmap.org] for people trying to choose a project. We'd love to have you. But honestly, I recommend applying for multiple projects if you really want to get in. Don't just spam a bunch of crappy boilerplate applications, but submit as many carefully-considered ones as you have time to write. Also, I've written up some tips [nmap.org] for preparing a great SoC application.
-Fyodor [insecure.org]
Hmmm (Score:1)
Javascript/AJAX/DHTML projects @ Dojo (Score:4, Interesting)
Dojo [dojotoolkit.org] is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. It allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more useable, responsive, and functional.
So, thats what we do - and we're involved with the Summer of Code for the third time in 2008. And this summer we have lots of exciting stuff planned: charting, accessibility, visualizations, automated testing, 3d graphics, ... or suggest your own.
- Rob :)
Scribus Team's Ideas (Score:5, Informative)
Alex
Scribus Team's GSoC Administrator
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].
Experience necessary? (Score:2, Interesting)
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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 tha
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Wine and Zumastor looking for students! (Score:1)
Sahana (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm stoked that Sahana - a project to develop a FOSS web-based system for disaster management has been selected again for GSOC. Thanks Goggle!
If you're interested in working on a system that will help ease suffering and save lives during and after a disaster, then consider contributing to the Sahana project. It was started after the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Sri Lanka and it now into our fourth year, and I think third GSOC year.
Some areas we're focusing hard on this year are incorporating social networking for disaster response, and implementing a more comprehensive GIS. We would welcome other suggestions.
Sahana@GSOC [google.com], Sahana GSOC ideas [sahana.lk]. If you want to discuss it more, join up to the Sahana maindev [sourceforge.net] list on sf.net.
If you want to contribute to an humanitarian project for a change, Sahana may be the project for you. Of course, we've got plenty of technical opportunities as well ;)
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Zhe Goggles, zhey do noting!
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"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 bother
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The point was that running some C code on your computer and displaying the result through javascript doesn't seem different than installing an active-X control to run the same C code (if it's something the client can easily handle). The former case d
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Of course, since a big goal of the programs is to engage university students, complaining about the fact that the program engages university students is pretty much insane. Next, you should take on those bastards at your local grade schools, I bet they wouldn't welcome your dad into their classes as a student.
RTEMS Accepted (Score:1)
gEDA and GSoC (Score:1)
The gEDA project was accepted again this year (second year we are participating). We are quite thrilled and grateful to Google for the opportunity! We are looking for students who are interested in working on free software and electronic circuit design software.
Here is gEDA's GSoC 2008 [seul.org] page as well as the suggested projects [seul.org] page. You can also look at gEDA's homepage [seul.org] for more info on the project in general.
-Ales (gEDA/gaf developer)