Google is hosting Summer of Code again this year. This is a program
in which they sponsor students to work on open source projects. The
students work under the guidance of mentors on specific approved
projects. For each completed project, Google will pay the student
$4500 and the project $500. For more information, see:
http://code.google.com/soc/
I've signed GCC up as a supported organization. Hopefully we can get
some students to work on some GCC projects this summer. That will be
good for GCC both in getting something done and in helping people
learn more about the code base.
If you happen to know any students who can hack gcc and could use an
extra $4500 for the summer, please mention this to them.
If we do get students, each one will need a mentor. Mentors are
responsible for ranking proposed projects and for working with the
students to complete the projects. If you are interested in being a
mentor, please send me a note. Currently I am the project admin for
Summer of Code, and will have to approve any mentor. My current
thinking is to restrict the mentors to people listed as a maintainer
in the MAINTAINERS file (i.e., more than just "write after approval"
access). At this point I have no idea how many proposals we will get,
if any, so I don't know how many mentors we will need.
Each organization can link to a list of ideas. Currently that link is
to:
http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/
If anybody wants to pull together a single URL of projects suitable
for students, probably on the Wiki page, that would be helpful. Or I
might try to tackle that in the next few days myself.
I haven't talked to the GCC SC about this, and I don't see any
concerns there. But I'll state explicitly that I'll naturally change
any part of this as the SC wishes.
Also, I am a Google employee, which I don't see as causing any
conflict for this. If anybody has a concern, please let me (and, I
suppose, the mailing list) know.
My plan is that the $500 which Google will pay to the organization for
each completed project will go to the FSF.
Ian
