Every year Google somehow finds a way to up its contributions to the open source community and 2008 looks to be no different. For Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2008, Google is paying for 1,125 student developers, which is an increase from the 900 students the program took in 2007.

The annual Google Summer of Code is upon us again. For the uninformed, that’s when Google pays hundreds of students and hundreds of mentors to work on free software projects, ranging from AbiSource to Zumastor. This is where great projects like the GDebiKDE installer were created. And this year looks even better than before, with 175 organizations and 1125 students.

XFCE was not accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2008. Should things have been different? And: how Thunar thinks I am idiot.

Google has published a list of mentoring organizations and projects for Google Summer of Code 2008. Quite a few gaming and gaming-related projects have made it again this year

Google is hinting at the possibility of an Australian version of the Summer of Code program. Quoting iTnews: "The global program had attracted students from 90 countries around the world, including Australia, said Hawthorn. But as the timing clashed with winter term time in the southern hemisphere, it's been tough for local students to participate. Stopping short of confirming the program, Hawthorn said Google is looking into finding the human resources - as opposed to the financial resources - to make it happen."

"This page has the project suggestions for GNU's participation in Google Summer of Code 2008. [...] Many GNU projects have more than one suggestion, so they're listed in alphabetical order by project..."

FOSSDev is an year long (Jan '08 to FOSSMeet@NITC '09) contest which aims at promoting contributions to FOSS projects. Total prize money amounts to Rs. 23,500 (will increase, subjected to sponsorships). If you have any queries regarding FOSSDev, make a post in the forum.

It is announced as part of FOSS Meet@ NITC 2008 and its focus of bringing more student contributors to foss. Programs like Google Summer of code is helping more student contributions to foss from India. 60 students got selected in this years program. List of students selected for Google Summer of Code from India

"The GNU Hurd project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008! ..."

"Hello,

it has been more than three years since the last "Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters", high time for an update on the port:

* Snapshot releases
* Base and toolchain status
* Xen support
* Autobuilder availability and archive coverage improved
* Developer machine
* Summer of Code 2008
* Still no debian-installer
..."