One hundred and one projects covering operating systems, content management, programming languages, and other open source areas will occupy the 630 students selected to participate in Google’s Summer of Code.
Google will follow up 2005’s successful Summer of Code project with another session this year. The 2006 version contains projects from 101 mentoring organizations, and 630 aspiring coders will forgo some of their time in the Big Blue Room this summer in favor of the warmth of overclocked processors.
Last year, Google attracted over 400 students to the program with hopes of exceeding that this year. They did so, and those students will be rewarded for their progress and completion of their projects. Students receive $4500 over the course of the program, while the sponsoring organization receives $500.
The list of organizations contains some of the most notable and respected open source projects in the world. Techies who have a non-Windows machine running somewhere most likely have several of these projects on those machines.
Google posted the announcement of the start of the Summer of Code project, and congratulated those accepted to the program. They also made note of a positive development with the program, after the selection process finished:
We’ve received several emails from students who still plan to work with their mentoring organizations despite not being accepted into the program, and we feel privileged to help a new generation of programmers get their hands into Open Source development.
Some of the projects coders will develop through the summer should have an impact on a few open source products known outside the dedicated world of technology.
Thunderbird – the email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation as an alternative to Microsoft Outlook has one student working on a project to improve the spam filters in the software.
Perl – the highly useful language will have a student develop a way to parse Perl 5 into Perl 6 output; “benevolent Perl dictator for life” Larry Wall will mentor this project.
Google – the program sponsor also mentors a few projects. The company’s open source leader, Chris DiBona, will mentor the self-explanatory “Automated Lexical Disambiguation in Machine Translation with Latent Semantic Analysis” project.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
