It's here: the Google Highly Open Participation Contest

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The Google Summer of Code program has been a joint labor of love between Google and the open source community for the past three years, and the results have been spectacular: hundreds of college students have been introduced to open source software, thousands of people across the globe have begun development together and millions of lines of open code have been produced, 4 million last year alone. We've been particularly proud of this program and how much it has helped the community and we've spent a lot of time thinking about ways we can continue helping open source projects find even more contributors. Today, we're pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our new effort to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research.

While we're very excited about many aspects of the contest, the best part is that everyone can participate. Contestants must meet the eligibility requirements, but anyone interested in helping out can simply suggest a task to be included in the contest. Our contestants have a chance to win t-shirts, cash prizes, and a visit the Googleplex for a day of technical talks, delicious food and a photo with our very own Stan T. Rex.

Want to learn more? Check out the contest FAQs and tell your favorite pre-college students to pick a task or two to complete. You can always visit our discussion group to get help or share your thoughts.

Update: Fixed the broken links.

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Sigurd Magnusson of SilverStripe on open source and the Summer of Code

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Sigurd Magnusson, co-founder of the SilverStripe open source CMS platform, was in town for the mentor summit that wrapped up the Summer of Code.

We used that opportunity to grab him, put him in a Tiki hut, and chat with him about SilverStripe. We discuss life as an open source company, and the experience and advice based on having ten students enrolled in the summer of code program.

Thanks to Ohloh we have statistics on the code produced by the students. Obviously, the lines of code metric is purely quantitative and doesn't show the actual work involved, but it is great to see how these students have produced:



In the chat below you will hear about some of the really cool additions that SilverStripe has in its trunk thanks to the students.

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Wrapping up Our Third Summer of Code

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

We just wrapped up our third Summer of Code, and as with 2006 we invited mentors from all successful organizations to Google for our annual Mentor Summit. We spent all day Saturday with our colleagues from the open source community sharing knowledge to improve Summer of Code, fostering collaboration and, of course, having fun! Our attendees proposed and led sessions, unconference style, from "How Do You Transfer an Itch?" to "The Stick, the Carrot and Sushi." Marty once again treated everyone to a day of free association and tinker toys in Casablanca.

Here's the obligatory group photo, and as you can see we've picked up a few more friends since last year.



You might also want to check out some pre and post summit pics from Bart, Seb and Wolf.

Congratulations once again to all of our students and mentors for another stellar showing in Summer of Code. Keep your eye on the program blog in the coming weeks for notes from the mentor summit and more success stories from our students and mentoring organizations.

(Photo Credit: Robert Kaye)

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Heading to OSCON?

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google's Open Source Team will be out in full force at OSCON 2007, and we welcome the chance to meet more members of the community at the conference. For those interested in learning about Google's open source activities, come and hear our annual open source update or learn more about how the community has used our project hosting service since its launch at OSCON 2006. For those interested in our developer applications, we'll be taking a look at how to write large, multipage Ajax applications with Google Web Toolkit and getting up close and personal with Google Gears. We're excited to hear your feedback and answer your questions.

Better still, several members of our team will be sharing some of the lessons they've gleaned from their years of contribution to open source. Come on by and learn about:

• Dispelling Legal Myths: Things OSS Developers Get Wrong About the Law


• Geek Herding on a Shoestring (BoF)


• How to Protect Your Open Source Project from Poisonous People


• Subversion Worst Practices


• What's In It For Me? How Your Company Can Benefit from Open Sourcing Code

On the other hand, life isn't all fun and talks. Come hack on Google Web Toolkit with us, join us for the Google Summer of Code community BoF, and find out the 2007 winners of the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Check out the new Google Summer of Code blog

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Looking for news on our popular program to encourage students to learn more about open source software development? Check out the newly launched Google Summer of Code Blog! We've got some great news there for all those interested in the program, including a surprise about this year's accepted students.

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Now Accepting Student Applications for Google Summer of Code 2007

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The results are in! After receiving applications from more than 300 open source organizations, we've narrowed the list down to just over 130 and published the list of accepted organizations. Now that we've selected the mentoring organizations for this year, we're accepting student applications for the program. Students should plan to submit their applications by March 24, 2007. We're also pleased to let you know that we'll be taking 800 students into the program, up from 630 last year.

For more information about the Google Summer of Code program, you can visit the program page. Better yet, read Chris DiBona's write up on the Official Google Blog.

Thanks to all of the organizations who applied to take part this year, and best of luck to all of our student applicants!

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Google Summer of Code: Mentors apply now!

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Ready to find the best and brightest students to contribute to your open source software project this summer? The Google Summer of Code™ 2007 program funds students from all over the world to work with mentors from the FLOSS community. We're now accepting applications from mentoring organizations, and the deadline is Monday, March 12, 2007. We'll post a list of approved organizations on the Google Summer of Code page on Wednesday, March 14, 2007. Students can start applying immediately thereafter.

See our FAQ for a preview of the application. And remember, if you have any questions, you can always find us in the Google Summer of Code Discuss group. Best of luck to all of our applicants!

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Google Summer of Code & Danish Linux Forum

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The Danish Linux Conference is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and the date is coming up soon! I'll be there to present on Google, Open Source and the Google Summer of Code ™ program on Saturday, March 3.

GSoCers, keep an eye out for me; I'll be sporting the orange and black Google Summer of Code t-shirt. If anyone in attendance has any questions about Google or our open source efforts, I would love to talk to you.

Hope to see you there!

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Speaking of Summer

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code^TM 2007 is on! Last year, Google funded over 600 students in 93 countries to work with 100 open source groups. We're extremely happy to announce that we'll be holding Google Summer of Code again this year. We look forward to helping new contributors join the community and write more code.

We won't start accepting applications until March, so in the interim check out the FAQs for more information. Our program administrators will also be hanging out in the Google Summer of Code discussion group and in #summer-discuss on Slashnet. We'd love to hear from you!

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Feels Like Summer

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

After a busy year running Google Summer of Code, hosting community conferences, adding new features to our project hosting site, and helping transform the Google Web Toolkit into an open source project, our team has finally had a chance to clear out the old inbox and catch up on the news.

And the news is awesome! All over the world, programs are springing up to get students involved in open source:

GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program: On top of mentoring 20 students for GSoC, GNOME funded six additional developer projects in Summer 2006, all by women. The GNOME journal has more information.

The OCaml Summer Project: To encourage growth in its developer community, Jane Street Capital will fund OCaml student projects this summer and then bring the students together in New York City at the close of the program.

Season of Usability: Student developers from several countries are working with mentors to improve usability in Inkscape, KDE and more.

Winter of Code: Korean games publisher NCsoft just finished taking applications for their program in late December. We look forward to hearing about the results of their efforts to get students from middle school through university level involved in open source development. (Note: The Winter of Code program site is in Korean, but feel free to try an English translation. If you would like to read more about the Winter of Code in English, ZDNet Asia has further details.)

We've also heard that the MySQL folks are planning their own Winter of Code program.

Heard about other programs like these? We'd love to hear from you!

Note: Post updated to correctly attribute sponsorship of the OCaml project to Jane's Capital.

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Google Summer of Coders at EclipseCon 2007

If you'll be in Santa Clara for EclipseCon 2007, be sure to stop by to meet some of Eclipse's GSoCers at the panel session The 2006 Google Summer of Code at Eclipse. Steffen Pingel, now a a committer for the Mylar project, will be joined by his fellow student Remy Chi Jian Suen, who created a Java implementation of the BitTorrent protocol for integration into the Eclipse Communication Framework. Eclipse organization administrator Philippe Ombredanne will also take part, as will Eclipse mentors Francois Granade and Mik Kersten and our very own Leslie Hawthorn.

We hope to see you there!

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NetBSD and Google Summer of Code

After participating in the Google Summer of Code program for 2005 and 2006, NetBSD has many reasons to be proud. Most of their students are still active contributors. Several have had their code integrated into NetBSD's releases. On top of all of that, the project gained three new committers.

Alan Ritter worked with NetBSD during GSoC 2005 to port the NDIS driver from FreeBSD to NetBSD. He continued to work on his GSoC project after the program ended for the year, and he later imported his code into NetBSD's source tree on March 30, 2006. He became a developer in April 2006.

Arnaud Degroote's GSoC 2006 project to add ipv6 support to the Fast_ipsec stack will be imported into NetBSD's source tree soon. As a result of his work during GSoC, Arnaud is one of NetBSD's newest developers.

Ruibiao Qiu's 2005 GSoC project to implement wide character support in NetBSD's curses library will also be integrated into NetBSD's source tree shortly. Ruibiao became a developer for the project in January 2006.

For more information on all things NetBSD & GSoC, check out NetBSD's roundup posts for 2005 and 2006. Congratulations to NetBSD's students and mentors for their tremendous success, and thanks to NetBSD for joining us for the two years of the Google Summer of Code.

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And the code lives on....

We've got some great news from the Dojo project about Google Summer of Code: as a result of their participation in GSoC 2006, two of Dojo's students have obtained committer status, and all three have had their GSoC code included in Dojo releases.

For more information on the students' accomplishments, check out the write-up of Satishkumar Sekharan's JavaScript linker project and the details of Heng Liu's improvements to Editor2. There's also a cool demo available showcasing Hiran Shyanaka Ganegedara's plug-ins for OpenRecord.

Congratulations to all of Dojo's students and mentors for their success in GSoC 2006!

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Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Mike Pinkerton

On Wednesday, January 10th, we'll be welcoming Mike Pinkerton for the third instance of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series.  Mike, lead developer for Camino, will discuss the past, present & future of the project, as well as lessons learned from Mozilla and the community.

Please feel free to join us at our Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View, CA at 7:00 PM for Mike's talk. Doors open at 6:30 PM, and refreshments will be served; please plan to sign in at Building 41 reception when you arrive. We hope to see you there!

For those unable to attend the December 2006 session, you can check out the video of Angela Byron, Hannes Papenberg and Laurens Vandeput presenting on Drupal, Joomla! and Google Summer of Code. The presentation contains great material on GSoC from the student perspective, which will be valuable for potential mentors and students alike.

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Google Summer of Code Update: The Free Network Project

Matthew Toseland, who mentored three out of four of last year's GSoC students for The Free Network Project, wrote a round-up post for the program's conclusion; in a private mail (reprinted with his permission), Matthew writes:

"Michael Rogers is busily helping us with simulations, which should result in a new load management architecture and greatly improved performance. His last commit was yesterday.

Florent Daigniere is busy but continues to make significant contributions as well as being a great person to bounce ideas off of on IRC. However he was working with us quite extensively before GSoC; GSoC meant we could have continuity. Last commit yesterday.

Jerome Flesch wasn't my student, but he continues to commit improvements to Thaw, and is active on Frost (our internal chat system). Last commit Monday. ... Jerome's first commitwas on the 6th of June 2006."

Congratulations to the mentors and students of The Free Network Project for their tremendous success in GSoC last year. We're extremely proud that 75% of your GSoC students became committers.

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