Google Summer of Code 2012: mentoring organisations announced

Google has announced the accepted mentoring organisations for its eighth annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event. According to Google Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) member Carol Smith, there were more than 400 mentoring applications for this year's contest, of which 180 open source projects were accepted – 41 of these are new to GSoC.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the Blender Foundation, the CERN Virtual Machine (CernVM), Clojure, the Debian Project, FreeBSD, the GNOME Project, the KDE Project, LibreOffice and Mozilla, as well as the Mono Project and SHOGUN (machine learning toolbox) are among the accepted mentors for GSoC 2012. However, as in previous years, a large number of projects that applied were not accepted to take part for unspecified reasons.

One of the more notable of these this year is X.Org. In a post on the X.Org mailing list, Stéphane Marchesin says that students can instead take part in the X.Org Foundation's Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC) program, which was inspired by GSoC. While the EVoC program has no time constraints, its web page notes that proposals are usually for a period of three to four months and that it funds students with $5,000 to $6,000.

Each year since 2005, Google has offered university students stipends to write and develop code for various open source projects as part of its GSoC event, which takes place over a period of three months. The student application period for GSoC 2012 will open on 26 March.

Further information about the 2012 Google Summer of Code program can be found on the GSoC 2012 web site. An overview of GSoC program statistics from previous years is provided on the Program Information for Past Years page.

See also:

• Google announces Code-in 2011 grand prize winners, a report from The H.
• Google Code-in 2011-2012 wraps up, a report from The H.
• Google's 7th Summer of Code comes to an end, a report from The H.

(crve)