07 April 2008

Is Google Summer of Code Fizzling Out?

I've always assumed that Google's Summer of Code, a generous if self-interested offer to pay for students to do some directed open source coding during school/university holidays, was wildly popular - after all, who *wouldn't* want to get paid for hacking? But maybe there are the first signs of momentum being lost in this post, which suggests that the recent deadline extension hasn't led to a flood of applications:

Extending the deadline has, for us, only resulted in six or seven more applications, and the number of applications is about 50% of what it was last year. I'm not sure why that is - persuading people to apply is not really within my power, at least. In the next few days, I guess I'll find out whether we have quality rather than quantity :-)

Anyone else with positive/negative experiences?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

A government smokescreen. Observe the additional charge on our electricity bills for useless wind farms. p

Unknown said...

i don`t have any any experience of the summer of code but i know one thing...google are NOT an open source company....this is just another PR gesture.

Anonymous said...

At Apache we've seen an increase in applications over last year. There's an increase in applications across the whole programme and an increase in the number of mentoring organisations.

Glyn Moody said...

That's good to hear - thanks for the feedback.

Glyn Moody said...

@mart - well, at least they're better than Microsoft.

Sorry for the delay - Google (sic) is eating comments....