Another one of Google’s excellent ideas. Continuing from last years Summer of Code, Google is giving a lot to the open source community by sponsoring projects. They’re inviting applications from students beginning May 1st to participate in a variety of exciting open source projects. You’re even free to propose your own ideas!

Here’s how it works. All the open source organizations have until April 31st to apply for the post of a “Mentor Organization”. All the biggies are already part of it: GCC, GNOME, KDE, Apache Software Foundation, Python, PHP, FreeBSD, Mono … the list goes on and is growing by the minute. I expect at-least 60 organizations to participate this time. On May 1st Google opens registration to students and will accept proposals from them until May 8th. After that the selection procedure begins. The mentor organizations will filter out suitable candidates and inform Google about the students they’d like to work with. Every accepted student will be assigned a mentor and the coding starts 23rd May!

Google is offering $5000 as a stipend for every accepted project. $4500 goes to the student and $500 to the mentoring organization. But that’s only if you successfully complete your project!

Last time, Google accepted around 400 students last year and they say the number will be greater this time. Lots of help available from SoC 2005 veterans on how to write proposals. Check out:

• http://google.wikia.com/wiki/Summer_of_Code

• http://summerofcode.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

• http://natulte.net/pub/soc-thoughts.html

And don’t forget to read Google’s FAQs

• http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html

• http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html

I didn’t know about the program last year, but I’m definitely going to apply this time! Hopefully something to do with PHP or GNOME, I haven’t quite decided on my proposal yet. I wish everyone all the best and hope that all of us have a great time this summer!