What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of CodeTM is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,000 students with over 100 open source projects, to create hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its third year, following on from a very successful 2006.

While the majority of past student participants were enrolled in university Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs, GSoCers come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, from computational biology to mining engineering. Many of our past participants had never participated in an open-source project before GSoC; others used the GSoC stipend as an opportunity to concentrate fully on their existing open source coding activities over the summer. Several of our 2005 students went on to become mentors in 2006.

What are the goals of this program?

Google Summer of CodeTM has several goals:

* Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all
* Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development
* Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers
* Provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer (think "flip bits, not burgers")
* Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette)

ghettonet wrote:
Maybe they could get someone to fix the module repository