Summer of Code Student Application Deadline Looms

chrisd writes "Hi everyone, just wanted to do one last shake of the old tree...the Summer of Code student application deadline is coming up on the 26th. We've got some great applications but I'd love to see more. We're accepting 800 students this year into the program and we have 131 open source organizations who'd love to see you apply. Anyone can talk about open source but you could be coding some with some of the best developmers out there. Apply today." Just a note: the 26th is an extension of the previous deadline. If you thought you wouldn't have time, you now have until next Monday. Get crackin'.

Where is the bleeding edge?

[mangu]

I looked over the list of sponsors and it seemed to be mostly about mature projects.

I think that where we really need fresh ideas is in the field that has been in the experimental phase ever since computers were invented: artificial intelligence. It would be great to see Google's massive hardware resources applied to creating (or trying to create) stuff like an artificial consciousness.

Let the old guys do the incremental improvements, young programmers should spend one summer doing things no one has ever tr

Re:

[EvanED]

Let the old guys do the incremental improvements, young programmers should spend one summer doing things no one has ever tried, or at least things they never heard about.

In one summer, for the equivalent of a grad student's stipend?

Re:

[MrDomino]

Parent is ridiculous. AI gets a good representation from e.g. the Fast Artificial Neural Network Library [google.com], and there are lots of innovative and experimental project ideas--see for instance Squeak's [google.com] collaborative development [squeak.org] proposal.

Can we say karma whore?

Re:Where is the bleeding edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Summer of Code is about little vignettes. Things that are well-defined and can be done and closed, leaving a nice taste in the mouth.

Something open-ended and nebulous like artificial consciousness is better suited for... postgrad work. Which students are also very welcome to apply for. As soon as they graduate :-)

Re:

[caseydk]

"Let the old guys do the incremental improvements, young programmers should spend one summer doing things no one has ever tried, or at least things they never heard about."

Considering the vast majority of new graduates are going to take a job where they're working on someone else's codebase tracking down bugs, implementing new functionality, and generally making improvements, the projects make quite a bit of sense. Further, if you read some of the details of what the various projects are talking about, som

Re:

[mangu]

Considering the vast majority of new graduates are going to take a job where they're working on someone else's codebase tracking down bugs, implementing new functionality, and generally making improvements, the projects make quite a bit of sense.

Could be, but one would expect more from a company whose name became a verb in the English language. If all a new graduate expects to do is to track down bugs in someone else's program one should say goodbye to all innovation.

What Google should be looking for is to

Re:

[caseydk]

"Could be, but one would expect more from a company whose name became a verb in the English language. If all a new graduate expects to do is to track down bugs in someone else's program one should say goodbye to all innovation."

The last time I checked, Google leveraged a huge amount of Open Source software in their infrastructure to make said innovation happen. As a result, they've solved bugs, implemented functionality, and probably done 100x more things that I simply don't know about.

A career in software

GNUstep !

[Nicolas Roard]

For those unaware, GNUstep got accepted this year [blogspot.com] ... So if you want to discover a neat little OO language (Objective-C), and work on a really great framework, don't hesitate !

GNUstep [gnustep.org] is a free implementation of the OpenStep API, cross-platform (windows, linux, etc), close to Apple's Cocoa (ie, Cocoa is itself an extension of the OpenStep API, so in fact you can port Cocoa app to GNUstep and vice-versa -- GNUstep can now even read/write apple nibs natively). In addition to the frameworks, there's nice development tools, in particular Gorm, the GNUstep's pendant to InterfaceBuilder.

Check the GNUstep wiki [gnustep.org] to see a list of potential projects !

Spellcheck Anyone?

[Jazzer_Techie]

you could be coding some with some of the best developmers out there

Is a developmer just a bunch of individual developers arranged into some sort of chain?

(Yes, I know a polymer is not a chain of polys. It's supposed to be funny. Leave me alone.)

Re:

[Breakfast Pants]

Do summer of code students get to work on some cool techmology with Ali G?

Great Program!

[fv]

I have been participating as a mentor for the SoC program since it started, and I highly recommend it. It is a great way to get paid, gain valuable experience and a great resume booster, and write code which will be used by thousands or millions of people! Your can read about the successful creations of Nmap SoC students in 2005 [slashdot.org] and 2006 [seclists.org].

This year I am involved with three projects which have been accepted for SoC this year:

• Nmap Security Scanner [insecure.org] (SoC Ideas Page [insecure.org])
• UMIT [sourceforge.net] (SoC Ideas Page [sourceforge.net]). This is an Nmap graphical front end which started out as a student's Nmap-SoC project, and now he has been accepted by Google to run it as an independent SoC project!
• Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility [cpsr.org] (SoC Ideas Page [privaterra.org]). I serve on the board of directors for this 501(c)3 nonprofit which aims to educate and influence policy makers and the public on technical issues.

And even if none of those projects float your boat, there are 128 others to choose from [google.com]. Remember that you can apply for multiple projects, and doing so can (with sufficient care and detail for each application) be a good way to increase your odds.

-Fyodor
Insecure.Org [insecure.org]

Re:

[specific_pacific]

"I have been participating as a mentor for the SoC program since it started, and I highly recommend it. It is a great way to get paid"

Don't have to read that twice!

Ah well.

[Elentari]

I'm still too young. Guess I'll have to wait until next year. Out of interest, why do applicants have to be aged 18 or older? This is probably a pretty stupid question, but I can't see an obvious answer.

Re:Ah well.

[Aladrin]

Legal agreements. The code they produce has to have legally binding agreements with it, and minors cannot enter into contracts in many places.

The exact nature of the agreement varies from project to project, at the decision of the project. Common agreements assign ownership of the code to the project, or assign ownership to the student but guarantee a perpetual licensing agreement with the project.

Re:

[Carthag]

A good rule of thumb: If the reason something is happening or required isn't immediately obvious, it's likely to do with law or the legal system. ;)

Re:

[dch24]

There's a good chance if you jump in on one of the projects anyway as a volunteer, you will be in a better position to get paid next year. First of all, it will save you the trouble of getting accepted as a SoCoder. Secondly, you will still gain the experience of working with top "developmers". And several of the SoC projects are back for their second year, so those would be good projects to work with. You could even (with a little research) find out who is chiefly responsible this year for selecting applic

And the Southern Hemisphere?

[lzmbr]

Perhaps Google could make a Summer of Code for the southern hemisphere too. I'd love to participate if it were in January.

Wikimedia's open projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Wikimedia's open list [wikimedia.org] for the Summer of Code '07. Some great stuff there. All you wiki-fanatics out there can do both SoC and wiki stuff at the same time.

Open Source Game Projects!

[mithro]

There are also a bunch of other Open Source Game projects you can work on, here is a short list.

• ScummVM - For all you adventure freaks. [scummvm.org]
• bzflag - that age old tank game. [bzflag.org]
• Ogre3d - one of the best OSS 3d engines out there. [ogre3d.org]
• Thousand Parsec - Go conqure the universe! [thousandparsec.net]

If you are interested in game programming you should give them a look.

Better join MoinMoin.. :)

[mpathy]

If you wanna do SoC stuff and do amazing wiki stuff, join the MoinMoin project, who also get accepted this year.

If you ask why you surely would prefer it, I have just one short answer: MoinMoin is coded in python, while MediaWiki is, uhm, "coded" in PHP.. :)

But all in all - the MoinMoin project is developing a popular wiki engine with steadly growing popularity - big names like Apache, Ubuntu, Python, Debian, Fedora, Xen, KernelNewbies, linuxwiki.org (de), etc. are all using MoinMoin to keep the contact goi

No Mythtv this year....

[russ1337]

I'm a little disappointed not to see Mythtv on the list. It could do with a boost.

Mythtv was on the SOC list last year but I don't think we saw much in the way of enhancements - just an 'experimental' add detection algorithm which you can use instead of the standard one. They had a list of things they wanted done, most importantly making setup a bit easier and a new (ajax?) UI.

The latest Ubuntu (Feisty) includes support for the PVR-150 out of the box, (IVTV drivers?), and will include more for Mytht

Re:

[RelaxedTension]

I read on the MythTV dev list that it was a pretty much a disaster for last year. The students worked on several things and finished almost nothing. It apparently turned into a situation of wasting the mentors time and the students not having the discipline to do the work from home. The MythTV project didn't want to do that again.

It's too bad, I support the idea of SOC, but maybe it needs closer inspection of actual work done prior to paying them. (currency exchange problems aside)

Re:No Mythtv this year....

[am 2k]

The problem with SoC is that the participants are like (inexperienced) contractors to the project. All other devs on the projects are (usually) non-paid spare-time developer.

This means that the SoC students have to be treated differently, which some mentors didn't expect. Since they're inexperienced, they usually plan far more than they could ever achieve in the time frame, but some projects picked those first since they sounded best. They expected the students to complete their work after deadline, so they gave them a positive review, even though nothing was finished. Of course, nothing happend, since students are used to dropping everything after a course is done.

For example, take a look at the Haiku project's SoC ideas [haiku-os.org]. They didn't participate last year, so they haven't learnt that lesson yet. Most of these projects are like a large master's thesis, some even more! That's ridiculous, there's no way any SoC student would be able to do that in the given time frame.

When students try to work on a project that's far above their head, you can expect that they constantly talk to their mentors about how to do it.

Gallery

[BacOs]

The Gallery Project [sf.net] hasn't yet seen a big interest in the 2007 Summer of Code. We'd like to encourage all interested students to apply before the deadline. Please don't wait until the last minute!

Students should feel free to submit their own project idea. In fact, we strongly suggest you submit your own project idea and have updated our ideas page [menalto.com] to reflect this. You don't have to start from scratch - our "Create your own idea!" section has links to several areas with possible ideas. The Sample Ideas

last nanosecond idea: mediawixi

[wixi]

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007 /proposals#WiXi [wikimedia.org]
will turn wikipedia (and mediawiki sites) into a useful language
learning interface a.) people can use to teach/learn language and
b.) machines can use to improve statistical machine translation