What I Did at Google's Summer of Code - Page 2

A Mozilla VoIP Project

The Mozilla Foundation is not on Google's list of awarded projects, but the Mozilla application development group MozDev is.

One of the projects that Google is funding at MozDev is called Cockatoo, which, according to developer Filip Dalüge, is about implementing the SIP protocol for Mozilla in order to enable phone calls from Mozilla Thunderbird.

There was already an internal Mozilla project, which tried to implement a SIP stack for Mozilla (called "zap"), so Dalüge had to reorganize his project somewhat.

"The general goal of my project is to advance Thunderbird by an increasingly important Web standard, SIP," Dalüge explained to internetnews.com. "Users should be able to make more use of their address books, which often already contains many phone numbers. With Cockatoo they will be able to initiate calls as easily as replying to an e-mail."

Microsoft recently paid an undisclosed amount to acquire a similar technology for use with its Outlook and IM applications.

According to Dalüge, Cockatoo will only provide minimal functionality based on the code provided by the end of the summer.

"But as the first step has been done now, I hope that it will be an invitation for other developers to extend the project, as SIP will surely be an important topic for Mozilla in the future," Dalüge added.

Some of The Rest

Nestled among the 410 projects that Google funded this past summer are 13 that were directly sponsored by Google for Google.

One of those projects was awarded to Meredith Patterson who spent the summer modifying PostgreSQL to support more natural, intuitive queries, ones that are qualitative rather than quantitative.

Meredith Patterson, a student sponsored by Google, noted that recently there have been a lot of new applications that use similarities to provide users with a more personalized experience.

One example cited by Patterson is OkCupid, which looks for similarities between users' responses to multiple-choice questions in order to help people find other people with common interests or possible romantic partners.

Another example is the new music-delivery service Pandora, which has a large library of songs, each annotated with information about the song's style. It uses this information to find music similar to songs that a user has already said he or she likes.

"I'm hoping that my project will make it easier for people to develop services like these," Patterson said.

The Google Sugar Daddy

Working for "free" is one thing; getting paid to work on Free and Open Source software is quite another. Google's funding of the various projects didn't raise notable problems, though it may have raised expectations for the future.

"One minor issue for us it that the reward offer is quite sizable, and was, in most cases, larger than what the bounty would have fetched in the usual Bounty system employed within Ubuntu," Ubuntu's Weideman said.

"This expectation will need to be managed."

KDE, however, didn't expect the "funding" to be any trouble at all.

"Google is going to fund us by making a donation, and the non-profit organization that is handling this (the KDE e.V.) is already used to receiving donations from companies," KDE's Macieira said.

"The KDE e.V. has existed for several years now and we have the experience in dealing with partner companies. The only problem will be to find out what to do with that money."

The lasting effect of what those projects achieved or will achieve for the sponsored organizations, the wider open source community and for Google itself has yet to be fully determined.

"Quite frankly, I don't know how Google will use the projects' results," Macieira said. "I hope they use it to promote free/open software and show that there is a healthy relation between the corporate world and the free software developers."