Google has announced that it will accept no fewer than a whopping 630 open
source projects for this year’s Summer of Code. The number is up from last year’s 410 projects.
Google’s Summer of Code initiative provides sponsorship funding for students
to work at mentoring open source projects over the summer. Chris DiBona,
open source program manager at Google, told internetnews.com that
Google received nearly 6,400 applications this year.
The increased number of awarded projects this year corresponds with an
increase in the number of mentoring organizations.
The 630 Google Summer of
Code 2006 projects are spread across 102 mentoring organizations, including
Google itself. Last summer there were only 41 mentoring organizations.
The potential total payout by Google as a result also goes up. The
financial part of the initiative stipulates that
Google will shell out $5,000 per student developer, $500 of which goes to the
mentoring organization and $4,500 goes to the student.
That means Google is pumping $3.15 million dollars into the
open source ecosystem with this effort this year, up from $2.05 million last
year.
“Last year we had 40 and this year we decided to go to 100 to make sure that
there were enough mentors available per student, which was our private
worry,” DiBona said. “I
am much happier with a larger group of organizations, as it provides a rich
selection of opportunities for the students,” DiBona said.
In terms of project awards for 2006, the Summer of Code site provides some
indication as to how the project awards break down this year.
KDE once
again was awarded 24 project spots. The Apache Software Foundation
was awarded at least 27 project
spots. FreeBSD was
awarded at least 14 projects and the Mozilla Foundation was
awarded at least 13
projects.
Among the long list of new mentoring organizations being awarded projects
this year is the ReactOS project, which was awarded at least 5 projects. ReactOS is noteworthy in
that is an open source attempt to replicate a full Microsoft Windows
operating system.
Earlier this year,
the project conducted an internal audit to verify that no actual Microsoft
kernel code was actually in the project.
Google’s summer of code also
supports the WINE project, which is a similar effort but unlike ReactOS. The goal is not to
produce an entire operating system.
For 2006, Google is sponsoring at least
seven projects at WINE. Google, through a separate effort, is helping WINE thanks to work that Google is doing in bringing
the Picasa photo application to Linux.
Also new this year is Sun’s openSolaris,
which was awarded two projects.
“We had about 20 project applications in the SoC and went through a
process internally to map students with the appropriate mentors,” Jim
Grisanzio, Community Manager, OpenSolaris
told internetnews.com. “We were allocated two projects, so we’ll
surely engage those students during the course of the summer.”
The initiative got off to a bit of a rough start earlier
this week when 1,800 student were mistakenly accepted to the program via e-mail.
Student projects for Google Summer of Code 2006 are due by
August 21.
