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:

  1. Anonymous8:33 am

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

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  2. 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.

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  3. Anonymous3:09 pm

    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.

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

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

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

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