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."
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Come on, openMoko sucks pretty hard and no SoC project is going to fix that. And if it somehow did stop sucking it would then be a competitor to Android - so why would Google fund it?
they didnt acepted me (Score:3, Funny)
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I dont know why they didnt liked my confiker worm :(
Hah! I knew you would show yourself one day! Now to cash in on that $250,000 prize...
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liqbase was accepted! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am so pleased that I have an extra pair of hands over the summer.
my liqbase project was one proposal out of 10 selected for the maemo.org community.
we are building applications for the nokia internet tablet device.
obviously I should show off what I'm building ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXp0Dg_UaY [youtube.com]
Offtopic question (Score:1)
Is there a good place to look at Nokia's plans for the platform (new hardware, etc.)?
http://maemo.org/news/ [maemo.org] isn't it (to rule out the very obvious), and I haven't found anything else in a fair amount of looking around.
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the closest to what you are asking is documented here:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Maemo_roadmap/Fremantle [maemo.org]
however we have not yet seen a physical device
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Thanks for the reply. Hopefully smart phones and media players don't completely push small computers out of the handheld market (they all sort of blend together, but the phones tend to come with a network and the media players tend to be less open).
Nothing from Vatican? (Score:1)
I got accepted! (Score:5, Interesting)
Will be "mentoring" two participants. (Score:4, Informative)
A few basic definitions to make this post clearer:
participant: student accepted into the program
sponsoring organization: pretty obvious one, the organization sponsoring the participants
mentor: the person from the sponsoring organization delegated to manage GSoC participants
I'm pretty psyched. I've got two students to mentor on two different projects - I think it's going to be a great summer.
GSoC is a brilliant program on google's part - they are transparent about their aims: to get the "sponsors" to evaluate the participants so google can think about hiring them.
Google avoids headhunter fees, gets an in-depth real-world evaluation with a significant codebase to review and open-source projects get quality work.
Google may still pwn my datas, but hey: this is clearly not evil.
Re:Will be "mentoring" two participants. (Score:4, Funny)
As a two time mentor, I think that definition is a little more accurate.
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Re:Will be "mentoring" two participants. (Score:4, Interesting)
I will be mentoring a student, too.
And yes, I expect to be bouncing patches back to students (we have two), and suggest improvements, and maybe even provide a code example here and there to help them. It's part of the learning process they will go through. Just like any contributor.
But coding is only one side of open source development. There are many more. Another goal is to try to integrate the student with the project, and let it be a fun and rewarding experience. If students stay with the project even after the summer of code is over, you've done the best possible job as a mentor. That is the hard part. It's much harder than getting the code right.
Aussies, Kiwis enter Google Summer of Code? (Score:5, Funny)
According to the article: "Eight Australians and five Kiwis have made the cut for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, announced today."
Should Aussies and Kiwis be eligible for "summer of code"? It seems to me that they should only be able to enter the "winter of code" contest if it takes place during June through August.
Re:Aussies, Kiwis enter Google Summer of Code? (Score:4, Funny)
Should Aussies and Kiwis be eligible for "summer of code"?
Psh. I'm still trying to figure out how a fruit knows how to code in the first place.
Re:Aussies, Kiwis enter Google Summer of Code? (Score:5, Funny)
The fruit you're thinking of Kiwifruit. Either that or you're calling the bird (or New Zealanders) gay. I'm not sure which.
Re:Aussies, Kiwis enter Google Summer of Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
How wonderful would it be... (Score:3, Funny)
Soon. It will come. I can almost see it.
"Highlights from the NAN Microsoft summer ~#33-
ccc00003322"
And a large BSOD.
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.
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epresent more than a 5 million dollar investment this summer, which is not petty cash or an insignificant investment for *any* organization.
It is a petty amount when your total cash on hand is 17 billion dollars.
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5 million is not really a huge investement for really big organizations. That's a pool of 1000 potential new hires. Consider what it would cost to get recruit 1000 new graduates, and have them working for 3 months while you find out whether they are any good. Consider what it would cost to supervise them, if it wasn't for the mentor organizations.
What's the headhunter fee for a good engineer?
This is a smart move by Google.
Re:Thanks Google (Score:4, Informative)
I have to disagree on that one. The Google Summer of Code is basically run by 5 people from the Open Source Programs Office. There's no one from HR involved.
Google has absolutely no control over who gets selected. The orgs alone choose their students. The only feedback that Google gets from the Summer of Code projects are two routinely hurriedly written reports from the orgs at mid-term and end of project.
Finally, of those that successfully complete the Summer of Code, less than 1% end up as Google interns and even less as full-time engineers.
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Also IBM does a similar thing with ACM-ICPC world finals. They have probably dished out $1,000,000 for us here in Stockholm. And that is for a field of 300 potential hires.
I am one of the lucky few who will have benefited from both these companies programs.
[PASTE] / The stupidity of a slideshow w/ icons... (Score:5, Informative)
That's right, all this for 14 giant-size icons on 14 pages of ads and other garbage to read the 14 sentences of text that contain all the important info.
Or I could paste them here.
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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:Glad to See GIMP is Participating (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know why you picked that one out. It will add a feature that visibly improves the quality of all image shrinks, past what Photoshop can do out of the box. It's a really useful, basic improvement.
Read about it here if you're curious:
http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode2009ideas#head-ee0a4959625baa7bff3da72ec494b0f5f10859dd [gimp.org]
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!
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However, only programming projects are allowed in Google Summer of Code. Marketing would of course be nice, but it won't be sponsored by Google.
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.
Mobile (Score:1)
The increasing importance of mobile computing where small screen size and less powerful hardware are important factors might result in more websites offering a true simplistic and lower res/bloat alternative. It needs to be automatically detected and redirected though to be really useful. One can hope anyway, because there really are just way too many "supersized" 5,000 calorie a serving websites out there and it gets worse daily. As it is now you have to load the bloated page first just to start to hunt fo
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I know nmap has some projects in GSoC as well but I didn't see them listed in the slideshow. Any others that didn't make the show?
automated duplicate detection ?!?!? (Score:3, Funny)
The Mozilla organization is going to sponsor a program to automatically identify dupes? Don't they realize what this could mean for the future of the entire internet AS WE KNOW IT? Think of the disaster it would cause... not being able to re-read the same flamewars over-and-over again.
Overview for BRL-CAD (Score:3, Informative)
Thought I'd share a basic summary of our student's projects for this year that are working on BRL-CAD. We accepted five students.
GSoC really has shown to be a fantastic opportunity for both open source communities and students, getting smart motivated passionate people working together on improving open source software and growing those communities. The program has an impressive ability to motivate and organize open source groups, helping them "get their act together" in many respects. While it's highly competitive with many organizations and students that will get left out, it's no more so than most graduate programs. There are similar short-term rewards and even greater long-term potential. To top it off, even if you don't "get in", you can still contribute! Some of our best new developers were students that were rejected in a previous year but then became involved and were better prepared next year.
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Yay! Constraint-based modeling is just about the best thing ever. I just wish there was a good line-based (and/or 2D) program that did it...
Wow, HYPERlinks! (Score:2)
Don't we just call them "links" nowadays?
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Were the BSDs not involved in GSoC this year?
Did you even look at the list?
DragonflyBSD: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/dragonflybsd/ [appspot.com]
FreeBSD: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/freebsd/ [appspot.com]
NetBSD: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/netbsd/ [appspot.com]
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404 Not Found
So yes, the *BSD are nowhere to be found...
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http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/dragonflybsd [appspot.com]
http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/freebsd [appspot.com]
http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/netbsd [appspot.com]
Nigeria?!? (Score:1, Troll)
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math fail? (Score:2)
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too lazy to rtfa, but the numbers in the summary add up to 459, not "over a [sic] 1000"
Probably because the numbers in the article weren't an exhaustive list of all participants.
RTEMS GSoC Projects (Score:1)
today's interesting but useless metric: (Score:5, Interesting)
Google SoC Projects per Capita:
United States: 0.69 ppm
India: 0.09 ppm
Germany: 0.67 ppm
Canada: 1.31 ppm
Brazil: 0.22 ppm
PPM = projects per million. Figure the U.S. benefits from Google being a U.S. company, and by the fact that English is the native language. Canada would also benefit in that respect. But if that's the case then where's the U.K.? Germany suffers from not having English as the native language, but then again, open source in general is probably more popular in Europe than in the U.S.
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In 2008, the UK had the 10th highest [blogspot.com] number of applicants (and accepted students). There was a spreadsheet posted a few weeks ago with details of which countries and even which universities had students accepted over the past few years of GSoC, but alas I can't find it right now.
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Aha, a bit more hunting around and here we go: more statistics than you could shake a stick at [google.com].
Google Censorship (Score:1)
Google seems to be openly blocking anyone from Iran accessing the GSOC sites for some time
2 years ago:
http://jadi.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2007/5/1/2917242.html [civiblog.org]
Today:
http://i41.tinypic.com/20gy3j4.jpg [tinypic.com]
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From last year's TOS [google.com]: Organizations based in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma), and other persons and entities restricted by U.S. export controls and sanctions programs are not eligible to participate.
You can't really blame a company based in the US for following US laws. Sure, blocking people from the whole site is pretty ham-fisted, but a US company does *not* want to have even the appearance of getting on the wrong side of these laws. If you want to change things, get a job at t