Google boosts Open Source (and students can get $4500)

The Summer of Code is Google’s program designed to introduce students to the world of Open Source Software Development.
This Summer, don’t let your programming skills lie fallow…Use them for the greater good of Open Source Software and computer science! Google will provide a $4500 award to each student who successfully completes an open source project by the end of the Summer. (payment details can be found in FAQ). By pairing applicants up with the proven wisdom and experience of established prominent open source organizations (listed below), we hope to make great software happen. If you can’t come up with a great idea to submit, a number of our organizations have made idea lists available.

I’m wondering what “OUR organizations” means … Did they already buy all of them? Yep, even If I was inteding to write a joke, the puzzling/scaring part is that this could actually be true …

Participating Organizations:
The Apache Software Foundation (ideas)
Asterisk
Blender (ideas)
Bricolage (ideas)
Codehaus (ideas)
Drupal (ideas)
Fedora Code
FreeBSD (ideas)
Gaim (ideas)
Gallery (ideas)
The Gnome Foundation (ideas)
Handhelds.org (ideas)
Horde (ideas)
Inkscape (ideas)
Internet2 (ideas)
Jabber
JXTA (ideas)
KDE
Project Looking Glass
LispNYC (ideas)
Live Journal
Mambo (ideas)
The Mono Project (ideas)
Monotone (ideas)
NetBSD (ideas)
NMap (ideas)
OhioLink
OpenOffice (ideas)
OSCAR (ideas)
The Perl Foundation (submission guidelines & ideas)
Portland State University (ideas)
The Python Software Foundation (ideas)
Samba (ideas)
Semedia (ideas)
The Subversion Project (ideas)
Ubuntu Linux (ideas)
The Wine Project (ideas)
WinLibre (ideas)
XWiki (ideas)
Google

One thought on “Google boosts Open Source (and students can get $4500)

  1. jwinter

    I think one of the biggest hassles with instant messaging is that it’s tied to the computer. If I’m away from the computer, like watching tv, I may miss an important IM. I can leave the speakers on the PC really loud, but then I’m always jumping up and running back to the PC to read an incoming IM in case it’s important. Most of the time it’s not. I cfan subscribe to a service with my cell phone—but that costs money. So here is (I think) the perfect solution, and a good GAIM plug-in that’s not too much work.

    I just installed a Pluto Home system (plutohome dot com). It’s a free, open source smarthome and media server. You put Bluetooth dongles on all the pc’s in your house, and then when you enter a room your Symbian Bluetooth phone turns into a remote control for everything in that room. It already tracks your movement—if you start listening to music in 1 room, your music will follow you as you move with your phone to another room. And it already sends messages to the phone based on events. For example, when the song changes, the cover art shown on my phone changes to show me what’s playing.

    So that got me thinking… Why not make a GAIM plugin for pluto so that whenever I get an IM, I saw it on my Bluetooth phone? That way I can either type a reply on the phone, or go back to the computer if I want to use the keyboard, or ignore it if it’s not important. And I’m not having to run back and forth to the computer to check IM. And it’s free since it uses Bluetooth! Plus, I think it’s such a real convenience it would be a great way to get people to switch to GAIM.

    I talked to the programmers at Pluto and they said it would be really easy since their stuff is already written in small modules and plugins. However, since we’re all open source, we could also just take whatever pieces were useful and do something completely new using the same concept.

    Many of the other GAIM projects listed are either specific for only some users (like Apple iChat), or would only be used by geeks (like the Perl interpreter). But not having to run back and forth to the computer is something everybody wants (imho). I don’t know how to recommend a new idea for GAIM, so I’ll just try the forums and hope somebody else likes it too.

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