The Summer of Code continues at Google, which presented a midterm report on the state of the project during the recently-held OSCON 2006.
“As part of the GSoC mid-term evaluations, we asked our mentors to give us a review of everything from their students’ progress to date to their favorite color,” Leslie Hawthorn of Google wrote at the Google Code Updates blog.
They did as requested, and provided some insight into the second summer of Google’s warm-weather program that matches programmers with mentors in a variety of organizations. For one thing, Hawthorn noted that the mentors seem to overwhelmingly prefer the color blue in a variety of hues.
On the project side, 1,260 mentors oversee 630 students from 456 schools in 90 countries. 102 open source organizations are participating in the Summer of Code.
The GPL has been the license of choice for a lot of the project creators. 48 percent of projects selected the GPL, while 13.7 percent tabbed the New BSD License.
Google picked up 370 applications, which included those they considered as submitted to an “other” category. KDE received the next highest total, followed by Ubuntu & Bazaar, and Python.
The projects students undertake for their organizational sponsors range from UI work to attacking bugs. For example, the group behind the FreeBSD operating system has a number of students working for its during the Summer of Code.
Gbor Kvesdn from Hungary has been working on cleaning up a number of issues with the FreeBSD Ports collection. Clement Lecigne is crafting fixes for Ipv6 stack vulnerabilities in FreeBSD.
Only five percent of those accepted into the program dropped out by the midterm. The remainder will hang on to collect the full stipend of $4500 Google pays to participating students.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
