Google spice brings out open source aroma

by David M Williams

Monday, 23 June 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! It's summer in the United States which means Google's annual season of code is in swing. This event has run over the past three years and is by all measures a successful happening. That it even happens is phenomenal enough and this year there's many great projects that will benefit, covering a wide range of fundamental open source applications as well as notable causes like the One Laptop per Child project. As in previous years, Google sponsors the hiring of student programmers over the summer break to enhance important free and open source software projects. These programmers don’t work for Google, they contribute directly to the project they are serving. The project doesn’t spend a cent, Google pays the students a stipend of $4,500. In fact, the project gets $500 from Google too. The resulting achievements don’t become the property of Google, they become part of the open source project they were contributed to. They are freely available to any person, and the resulting applications are better as a result while the students gain valuable paid work experience. This event really makes Google stand out, in my opinion, as one of the major forces enabling the success of open source in the world today. In the three previous years over 1,500 students and 2,000 mentors have taken part from 90 countries. This year, there are 1,125 students working across 175 projects. This has grown from 400 students and 40 organisations in the launch season back in 2005. These projects read like a who’s who of what’s important in open source, both in terms of key applications and advocacy. There are worthy causes like the One Laptop per Child project through to Tux4Kids – which strives to make useful and educational software tools available for young children – and through to the Creative Commons concept itself. There are mainstays like Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL on the list, as well as the two major window managers GNOME and KDE, and several Linux distributions such as Debian, openSUSE and Fedora. It’s interesting, perhaps, to note that Ubuntu is not on the list, but it will undoubtedly benefit from any enhancements made to the software applications which Ubuntu redistributes as well as to Debian from which Ubuntu derives. This year’s summer of code season kicked off the coding on May 26. We’re approaching July 7th which is the mid-point and where the first evaluations take place. We’ll know in a couple of weeks if the projects look to be shaping up successfully. There’s then another month until the suggested “pens down” date of August 11th; coding should finish here, leaving a week to tidy up the code, actually write documentation (Google’s FAQ says “improve documentation”, but let’s be honest here, I’m sure a lot of it gets left to the end!) and make some automated tests. August 18th is the end of the coding part of the program for the year, and the definite pens down date. Let’s check out some of the noteworthy projects and what good things we can expect to see. CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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