Submitted by Google announced the participating Open Source Projects this Monday. Following that, students are encouraged to select projects they are interested in and submit their work proposals from March 24 to 31. Among the participating projects are: Debian, DragonFly BSD, ES operating system, FreeBSD, Gentoo, GNU Hurd, Haiku, Linux, NetBSD, and openSuse. Overall, projects range from kernel hacking to web applications. Last year, 900 students were accepted, with Google paying them and their mentoring projects up to USD 4.5 Million.
Please count Pardus GNU/Linux distro, too!
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/pardus/about.html
http://pardus.org.tr/eng
I hope some folks look into helping the GNU/HURD project. It is (imho) a truly innovative project, if it could only get the “love” needed to get over the hump. Once thing I did notice on the GNU/HURD project page was this quote “The Hurd is the only general-purpose multiserver microkernel system in development today that is nearly ready for everyday use, and offering almost perfect UNIX compatibility”. How does this jive with Minix? I thought Minix was a general purpose microkernel system ready for everyday use, and very UNIX compatable. Is it perhaps not a muliserver system? Anyone have the scoop?
People don’t want to work in Vaporware.
The HURD project code requires a complete rewrite and has not ever worked. The project web is 5 or 7 years old and even Debian is not supporting it anymore.
If the GNU people want to see a progress in HURD they should first get their own developers working on it to get something. Once they have something that boots and that is not going to be replaced by the next fad in microkernels the next month, people will contribute to it.
If its unfortunate 18 year history is any indication, there is not enough love in this world to get poor HURD “over the hump”. Even the FSF keeps it locked in its room and slips food to it under the door.
Edited 2008-03-20 20:55 UTC
It’s very cool to see some of the smaller projects thrown in with all the heavy hitters and server stuff. BZflag and ScummVM for the win!
like Haiku! selected for summer of code again, lets hope this is the start of a long tradition. good variety of proposed tasks so here’s hoping they get lots of applicants.
I’d definitely love to see this done.
Really good to see the Gnumeric spreadsheet as one of the accepted groups.
One of their proposed ideas is “Multi-Dimensional data visualisation” (as in Excel’s pivot-tables). I *really* hope that idea is accepted! Pivot-tables are about the only major thing that Excel has and Gnumeric doesn’t. Once they are in Gnumeric, that’ll make Gnumeric an even better option for companies wanting to stop paying the annual MS “tax” (license fees).
Edited 2008-03-20 20:56 UTC
Is Gnumeric really that good? If I switched my business users from OpenOffice 2.3 calc to Gnumeric, would they likelybe happy? Or would they more likely show up at my door with torches and pitchforks?
From a desktop integration and memory efficiency perspective, it is certainly attractive. Epiphany has certainly been a win over Firefox for us.
I’ve always preferred Gnumeric. Not because it had more features or because it has amazing excel import support (it doesn’t on both counts), but because it started up really fast and did everything I’ve needed to use a spreadsheet for in a quick and intutive manner.
Are there all kinds of advanced statistical and mathematical operations not supported by Gnumeric? Probably, but I do all my non-trivial stuff in MATLAB, so I’ve never run into any of them.
So the question as to whether it’s better than calc or not comes down entirely to what you’re using your spreadsheets for.
In my opinion, Gnumeric is much more advanced than OO Calc.
* Drawing graphs / visualization of data is much better
* Import is much more sophisticated, letting me import
numbers like 1.235e-2, where OO Calc just failed
* Gnumeric is known for its really great numerical
stability
* Gnumeric has a more intuitive and responsive user
interface
I would not recommend anyone to switch from Excel to OO Calc, but to Gnumeric would be fine for most people.
UPDATE: Btw, in a response to the post above, I had some statistical needs in Gnumeric and found what I needed, except a “round to X valid digits” function, which I also missed in OO Calc and guess is not available in Excel, too? .. Typical statistic tasks like ranking by value, standard deviation of a population, etc. are supported, also some regression stuff…. you can look it up on the web and compare to your/your users’ needs.
Edited 2008-03-21 14:26 UTC
I’m disappointed at the lack of ideas for the Linux kernel… especially compared to those for BSD.
A little work on Presentation Manager would be a nice project idea.
eComStation is not an open source project.
But the work being done on it is (Voyager).