openSUSE's Summer of Google

For hundreds of college students, the lazy days of summer will soon give way to hours and hours of software development that will give them useful on-the-job experience and a $4,500 summer stipend, thanks to Google Inc.'s Summer of Code 2008 program.

For the third year in a row, Google, which uses massive amounts of open source software and code in its own operations, is conducting the program to help increase the world's supply of open source software, according to the company.

This summer, more than 175 open source projects will participate, including openSUSE, the open source, community-supported version of Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux division. OpenSUSE was a participant in the program two years ago, and will again participate this summer.

"This gets people directly involved in the community," said Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE's community manager. "It gives students direct involvement in open source projects. When you haven't been involved in an open source project, there's a bit of intimidation. This can help people get over that."

The openSUSE effort had 10 different software development projects accepted this year by the Summer of Code program. They include:

* an interactive crash analysis project to look at software crashes.

* work on face-based authentication.

* work on Grub4ext4 to enable the ext4 file system as a boot partition.

* a new approach for RPM package creation.

* work on a GNOME Build Service client for openSUSE.

* work on Build Service-Eclipse integration.

So far, the Google Summer of Code program has funded more than 1,500 students and 2,000 of their mentors since its creation. Participants are involved from more than 90 countries around the globe.

Other open source projects that have participated in the Summer of Code include Dojo, Python, Samba and Ubuntu. The program will run this year from May 26 through August 18.