Google Summer of Code 2009 Wraps Up

The Google Summer of Code global program that offers young developers financial conditions to write and develope code for open source projects has come to an end this week. Students around the world have worked in 150 companies accepted in the program interacting with industry veterans and experienced mentors.

The Summer of Code project was launched in 2005 by Google to help develop and financially sustain the open source market. It offers financial stipends for students around the world willing to dedicate their summer and work in a open source project.

This year's edition of Summer of Code has managed to sponsor about 1,000 students under the supervision of 2,000 mentors in 150 open source companies from various fields of activity.

Students have contributed with code and gained invaluable experience working in real software or web development companies, surrounded by renowned experts from the IT industry.

Citing just o few of the companies that have welcomed tomorrow's geniuses in their ranks: WordPress, Drupal, GNU Project, Joomla, Lime Survey, MySQL, Moodle, The Python Software Foundation, The Perl Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia), The Apache Software Foundation.

From the IT and software market, we name: Fedora, Red Hat, Gentoo, Mozilla, OpenSSH, The FreeBSD Project, The Linux Foundation, VideoLAN, openSUSE Project, Pidgin and many more.

Leslie Hawthorn, member of the Google Open Source Team, has informed that more than 85 percent of all students participating in the program have passed their final evaluations. Companies were graded as well by their students on different criteria ranging from work environment conditions to mentor feedback.

“These successful Open Sourcerers are busy preparing code samples for the world's perusal,“ said Leslie Hawthorn. “Of course, there's no real need to wait for code samples - many of these students have already had their work integrated into their project's code base.”