Digital Media Buzz > Google’s Summer of Code Approaches: Long live open source programming

Google’s Summer of Code Approaches: Long live open source programming

 

By N. Clark Judd

It may seem odd for a young developer’s first interaction with the open source community, with its bevy of free software, to result in a tidy payday.

But this is a reality for many of the participants of Google’s Summer of Code program. Held annually since 2005, more than 2,500 college or pre-college students from more than 100 countries worldwide have attended the search giant’s event to work on open source tasks. Google doles out  $4,500 stipends, over the course of a summer, to developers who successfully complete a course of work with a mentor on a designated project. The mentoring organization gets $500. This year, students have already been selected to work on projects ranging from Drupal and the Firefox Web browser, to an emulator for old console games — and work is supposed to begin May 23.

The result, like all open source software, will be posted by the contributors for all to see, use and modify. For people who use the software that’s being improved, it might seem like something for nothing. But the students are getting paid — and their mentors interact with the next generation of talent.

“We build new contributors and we get young people interested in open source,” said Greg Knaddison of Growing Venture Solutions, a Drupal developer.

Knaddison is mentoring a student this year who seeks to build improved voting functionality into Drupal. If Dario Ghilardi is successful, he’ll put Drupal well on its way to having the kind of knowledge management capability that drives websites like Yahoo! Answers or stackoverflow.com. Last year, Knaddison said, Ghilardi helped launch another security tool for Drupal.

On Google’s dime, Mozilla has accepted a project that will allow a bug tracker, which is shared with at least 900 other companies, to automatically detect if a bug report duplicates an existing issue, among other projects. 

Sunlight Labs, the government 2.0 arm of non-profit Sunlight Foundation, has taken on two students to work on a project that will gather and make available legislative data from all 50 state legislatures. Sunlight is also working with another student to work on a website that will aggregate and deliver constituent messages to lawmakers. And Knaddison is involved in one of 18 projects to improve Drupal that range from Ghilardi’s voting module to development of the system’s ability to handle multimedia.

The idea of getting something for nothing — even with the free Web server software Apache and the free operating system Linux — still doesn’t sit right with plenty of people, Knaddison admits. 

“In my opinion it seems like there are certain people who will just dismiss it out of hand because they think that open source is like Communism or something; it’s just evil,” he said.

But that $5,000 isn’t the only cash a talented young coder can expect to see. Ghilardi, for instance, is a freelance Drupal developer. “I am already making money with open source project[s],” Ghilardi wrote in an e-mail May 15. 

How-to books and manuals for open source software are book publisher O’Reilly Media’s stock in trade; Oracle is seeking to buy Sun Microsystems, the current home of Java and MySQL, though shareholders are seeking to block the sale.

And developers like Knaddison seem to be doing just fine as consultants, taking fees to help clients work with open source software like Drupal, or to innovate new and different things to fit a client’s specific needs — then sharing those ideas with the rest of the Internet.

“If we put in hundreds of hours on a project, and then spend an extra five hours sharing the results of our work on Drupal.org and as a result of that we get credibility and friends in the community who can help us out in the future,” Knaddison explained, “from a business perspective, that’s a no-brainer.”

N. Clark Judd is a reporter living in New York City.