Google have announced their “Summer of Code” program, the purpose of which is to introduce students to the Open Source development process. Google will pay $4500 to each student that completes an OSS project by the end of summer.
The list of Open Source organizations supporting the program is a who’s who of the OSS community including such big names as Apache, Wine, Mono, KDE, Gnome, Net and Free BSD and OpenOffice.org among many others. Read more at Google’s Summer of code page.
Projects like this are of great benefit to the OSS community, they bring fresh ideas and new developers and they also raise the awareness of Open Source with the next generations. Google built most of their system using Open Source software like Linux so it is nice to see them giving something back. Other corporations should be encouraged to start similar projects. They get something back also, the chance to evaluate and hire new and emerging talents before they are snapped up by the usual suspects.
