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.

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.

"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..."

The Debian project is proud to announce that it has again been accepted by Google as a mentor organisation for the Summer of Code programme. We have been allocated twelve tasks for this year. Google will fund the students mentioned here to work full time on those tasks during their summer vacation, from May 26th to August 18th.

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

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

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

Following GNU AGPLv3, Mozilla Public License is named as not popular enough by Google’s code hosting service.

“The search giant has said Google Code is no longer accepting projects licensed under MPL, although existing MPL-licensed code is allowed to stay.”

"We moved the code repository of Clipperz’s open source projects from Google Code to SourceForge, because Google doesn’t like AGPL and is kindly requesting all developers that opted for this license to leave..."