Now that I live in the Southern Hemisphere I’m going to have to get used to cognitive dissonance like the Google 2006 Summer of Code starting up as the days get shorter and the air gets a cold chill. Kudos to Google for this: they gave out $2,000,000 last year and will do so again. More importantly, they’re bringing new people to open source in a very positive way. The students have mentors from open source projects, work within and for those projects, and are in some ways being paid to go through an open source boot camp. And, from the opposite point of view, they’re paying the open source projects to get used to bringing in new blood. This is just as valuable: a hundred different things can make it difficult for new contributors to join existing projects, and the Summer of Code encourages the projects to eliminate those obstacles. It’s a win-win-win, and I’m very pleased to have Chris Dibona (the father of Summer of Code) at OSCON to fill us in on how the 2006 edition is going.
