Google is running their Summer of Code project again this summer. (We wrote about the project last year.) For those who don’t know:

Summer of Code 2006 is a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period. The inaugural instance of the program, which took place last summer, brought together 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations from 49 countries. We’d like to include even more organizations and participants this year.

We may not always agree with the actions of Google (or anyone else, for that matter), but it’s hard to argue with paying students to work on free software. Each student accepted to the program will receive a $4,500 stipend for their work, with $500 going to their mentoring organization. Mentor projects include projects such as Apache, Creative Commons, LiveJournal, FreeBSD, the GNU Project, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Needless to say, this is a great opportunity to help out free software projects and encourage young developers to code F/OSS. The applications are due by Monday at 5 pm Pacific time, so if you’re interested, hop on it!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 1:37 am and is filed under Commentary, Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.