Summer is under way and, once again, students participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project are flipping bits, not burgers.

The project derives its name from the Summer of Love. Now in its third year since launching in 2005, the GSoC gives student software developers an opportunity to gain practical experience creating open-source programs or helping with established projects. While most students come from computer science and computer engineering programs, a variety of educational backgrounds are represented, including students in computational biology and mainstream engineering. The students work with a mentor and are paid a stipend for their participation. According to Google’s Web site, several of the 2005 students served as mentors in 2006.

In its first three years, the GSoC engaged more than 1,000 students who worked on more than 100 open-source projects, creating hundreds of thousands of lines of code. In 2005, Google worked with 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations representing 49 countries around the world. The number increased to more than 600 in 2006. In 2007, Google accepted 131 organizations and more than 900 students. Students could submit up to 20 applications, although only one would be accepted; 6,200 applications came in.

The Goals

According to the Web site, Google’s goals for the GSoC project include releasing more open-source code for the benefit of all; inspiring young developers to participate in open-source development; help open-source projects attract new developers and committers; provide qualified students the opportunity to find summer work in a field related to their academic training; and to give students more exposure to real-world software-development scenarios, such as distributed development, software licensing and mailing list etiquette.

Google does not view this project as a recruiting tool, although the company does look at the program’s results to identify potential recruits. While past student participants have reported that their experience on the project made them more attractive to employers, most who found work are not currently employed by Google.

How It Works

A Wikipedia entry reports that early in March, prospective mentoring organizations submit applications to Google. By mid-March, Google publishes its list of accepted mentoring organizations and invites student applications. When students apply, they detail the project they want to perform. The corresponding mentoring organization evaluates the students’ proposal(s) and ranks the applications. Google then decides how many projects each mentoring organization receives, and selects the top-rated applicants for that organization. The mentoring organization must provide a mentor for each accepted project.

In mid-April, Google publishes a list of accepted student applications on its Web site. Students begin coding in late May, and Google begins issuing first payments. The mentors perform mid-term evaluations in July and final evaluations in late August. In 2006, 82 percent of the participating students received a positive evaluation. Any code developed during the course of the project belongs to the mentoring organization unless otherwise agreed.

Projects 2007

The GSoC Web site lists this year’s participating members and provides an abstract of the projects that are under way. There are far too many to cover here, but include One Laptop per Child, or OLPC , a new non-profit organization that is researching the possibilities of developing a $100 laptop. This technology would have a huge impact on how the world’s children receive their education. OLPC has eight projects in the GSoC project, dealing with such matters as exploring alternate energy systems, facilities to charge backup batteries, and similar issues.

Another participant, WordPress , the organization behind the popular open-source blogging software, has 10 projects under way. They company’s projects include coding that will facilitate page management and make it easier for bloggers to change the order of their pages. Another WordPress project involves coding that improves support for podcasting.

The Mozilla Foundation is another participating member. Its several projects include developing code to support roaming in the Thunderbird e-mail application, and coding to add Firefox support for the new JPEG 2000 image-compression algorithm. JPEG 2000 produces higher-quality images at smaller file sizes than the standard JPEG, but currently only the Safari browser renders the JPEG 2000.

Google itself has four projects running in the GSoC. Google’s own projects include development of coding to realize socket support in Google Web Toolkit on a browser level using GWT Socket module. Another Web Toolkit project seeks to “make the process of writing gadgets in it less of a challenge.”

Growing Pains

As could be expected, the GSoC project has been a learning experience for Google and the mentoring organizations, as well as the students. In the 2005 season, Google received criticism from the open-source organizations for providing insufficient time to plan projects. Nevertheless, 39 organizations participated, including FreeBSD, Apache, Ubuntu and others.

Additionally, the majority of projects stalled immediately at project end. Wikipedia quoted Google’s open-source program manager, Chris DiBona, as saying that only 30 percent of students stuck with their projects afterward. The number of surviving projects may be less than half. However, in an interview with InternetNews , DiBona said that the GSoC project isn’t only about getting coders to remain with their projects after September. Google also wants to introduce students to the open-source development process and to keep them working in a computer science-related field over the summer.

Some mentoring organizations indicated that, in future years, they would spend more time selecting appropriate projects, and would look for ones that are more likely to be completed within the time allotment.

As for GSoC 2006, things got off to a rocky start in late May when 1,800 student applicants received an erroneous e-mail saying their projects had been accepted. A follow-up e-mail a few minutes later apologized for the error, and told recipients that if they had received two e-mails, one saying they were accepted and one saying they were not accepted, then they were not accepted. Not all applicants found this amusing.

Similarly, GSoC 2007 has not been “glitch-free.” Hoping to increase the number of student applicants, Google extended the application deadline from March 24 to March 26, and then, at the last minute, to March 27. In early April, the acceptance letters were delayed for administrative reasons. At one point, Google’s Web interface erroneously changed to give each applicant a status of “not selected.” This, as Wikipedia explained it, “caused a huge number of Summer of Code result-awaiting nerds to just suffer a collective heart attack.” Google responded by saying that the acceptance e-mail was the only genuine word regarding acceptance or rejection.

Good grief! Would someone volunteer to teach the folks at Google how to use e-mail and how to update a Web site?

Anyone wanting to hear Summer of Code podcasts from participating students can surf on over to the Google Summer of Code Blog . You’ll find a number of links to podcasts and videocasts. Apparently, students who meander into Google’s headquarters are pressed into duty to create a podcast describing their activities.

Author: June Campbell
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What is open source? The webopedia describes it as follows:

Generically, open source refers to a program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge, i.e., open. Open source code is typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community. Open source sprouted in the technological community as a response to proprietary software owned by corporations.

Not all open source programs are worth downloading, but there are a few that merit further attention, including:

1. PHP Originally called Personal Home Page, PHP is the backbone of many message boards. Yes, you can use proprietary software such as vBulletin, but you will pay a licensing fee and fees for updates. For one site, the cost may not be prohibitive, but if you run several sites your costs can easily become a significant part of your budget. Search the internet for a free PHP provider such as PHPBB2.

2. Web Templates Finding decent templates does not have to cost you dearly. There are sites offering some very well made templates that would cost you as much as $100 if purchased separately. Naturally, “everyone” downloads the copies, but you can modify it accordingly to give it your own look. The best ones are CSS derived and web standard compliant.

3. Web Browsers Internet Explorer isn’t the only name in town when talking about web browsers. Yes, they are dominant, but so many web savvy folks have tired of Microsoft’s dominance and are switching to Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and Safari to name a few.

4. Email Client Thunderbird is the name of another project developed by the people who brought to you Firefox. With Thunderbird you can send and receive email, stop SPAM, and add plugins to design the program the way you want it to look.

5. Office Software MS Office rules as WordPerfect barely hangs on. Still, there are options to these two productivity suites in the form of OpenOffice.org. A big freebie associated with this site is the *pdf maker, saving you lots of money over purchasing Adobe Acrobat. Certainly OpenOffice isn’t as snazzy as MS Office, but for the price — F-R-E-E — it is worth a look.

Are all open source products great? No, absolutely not. Some proprietary software developed by corporations are far superior and worth it to you if you do not have the time or inclination to make a move to open source. Still, open source provides a wonderful alternative to cash strapped and Microsoft weary web developers. In a day when corporations throw their considerable influence around, it is nice to see developers donating their talents to the worldwide web. Become a part of the growing open source movement today!

Author: Matthew Keegan
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Shortly after I hosted a conference call last Thursday on the GPL v3 draft process, I smacked myself in the forehead for not following up on this comment by Matt Asay:

“I would argue that it’s true that giving the Web properties a free ride encouraged them to get started on a dime rather than a dollar; I’m not sure I’d go so far to say that Google would be out of business or never would have gotten off the ground if it had paid more than $69.99 to Red Hat…”

Asay was discussing the prospects of closing down the “ASP Loophole” in the GPL, which now is alive and well in the v3 draft but, call participants generally agreed, is still in the cross hairs of the open source community as a general shortcoming in OSS licensing. Google is often cited as a likely source of pressure on the Free Software Foundation – which administers the GPL – that caused it to drop provisions in v3 to force services companies that modify open source code to open up that modified code, even if they don’t re-distribute the software directly.

My question to Asay should have been:

“But Google isn’t in the business of not going out of business, right? It’s in the business of putting other folks out of business.”

That’s overly Darwinian, or maybe Patton-esque, come to think of it. But the reality is that businesses are not communal; they can cooperate with each other, but that’s typically only in times when there seems to be plenty of revenue to go around, and even then allegiances posture themselves against other businesses. This has always seemed to me to be the ultimate conundrum of how open source – I mean the fervent, no-software-patents kind of open source the FSF started out the v3 draft process with – will mesh with business, which is far better described as an ecosystem (think Whiskers v. Lazuli) than a community.

I’m even more upset that I didn’t ask that question, because Asay had an interesting answer that he volunteered as a concept later in the call (fat lot of value I added). He suggested that in a future licensing scheme, companies that employ open source code internally could elect to contribute cash instead of open code.

Obviously, details on how this cash contribution might be metered or accomplished are unclear – some might argue that Google is already making a pretty big cash contribution to open source by encouraging its developers to work on side projects while they are on the G-clock – but Asay’s general suggestion caught my interest, as well as that of Rob Enderle, who commented on the call today in his blog. (The hour-long podcast of the call is definitely worth a listen.)

Seems to me that businesses, particularly SaaS vendors who have benefited enormously from the ASP loophole, would be far more inclined to spend money than to open up code that they considered to be strategically important. If every smart piece of development in, say, the CRM SaaS space, were to be opened up, you’d end up with a sector driven by marketing spend, which ultimately is good for nobody – certainly not customers.

Of course, there are a ton of questions that would have to be answered before a cash contribution model would be viable. How many mod generations back would the cash contribution need to go? Would companies be able to agree to a percentage of future revenues as opposed to up-front outlays, to encourage vigorous open source adoption in niche SaaS sectors? All kind of annoying business stuff.

But clearly these are the kinds of answers open source vendors need to find if they intend to participate in the SaaS boom many of them are driving.

Author: Ken Hardin
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