2015 Google Summer of Code organizations announced [LWN.net]

By Nathan Willis
March 4, 2015

Google announced the approved mentoring organizations for the 2015 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program on March 3. Those organizations are the projects that will work with the 2015 batch of GSoC students, giving each student a paid internship—and giving the projects an extra full-time developer for a few months. One notable change in this year's lineup is that there is an overall reduction in the number of approved organizations—and some of the organizations absent from the 2015 list have been mainstays of previous GSoC programs. Still, more than a quarter of the included organizations have never been in any previous GSoC "class," which means that there will be the opportunity for interested students to get involved in some new parts of the open-source-software landscape.

The list of accepted mentoring organizations is available in an online spreadsheet-style document (which can be exported as a CSV file). 137 organizations are included for 2015, out of 416 applicants. The blog announcement notes that 37 of these organizations are new to GSoC.

Since GSoC has developed over the years into a reliable source for developers—more than 1,300 students participated in 2014—projects could come to view the program as a regular part of their development plans. But projects must re-apply to be mentoring organizations every year, and the 2015 list omits a few organizations that have been frequent participants. Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, and Tor have all made multiple appearances in the past (Tor often in concert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation), but are not on the 2015 roster.

The GSoC office does not publish any record of which organizations apply to be mentors but are not selected. However, Mozilla's Florian Quèze appeared to be at least a little surprised about Mozilla's lack of inclusion, and published a blog post on the subject on March 3. Quèze cited an email exchange with the GSoC office, in which he was evidently told that the decision to not include Mozilla this year was a difficult one, and that:

There's an assumption that not participating for one year would not be as damaging for us as it would be for some other organizations, due to us having already participated many times.

That assumption would, presumably, hold true for the LF, EFF, and Tor as well—all of those organizations are large and are on essentially stable footing. Furthermore, as Quèze pointed out, there are now multiple opportunities for students and other developers to contribute to open-source projects. Quèze pointed readers to a Mozilla-specific site designed to guide interested contributors toward any of several other coding opportunities connected to Mozilla projects.

A few other projects noted their lack of inclusion this year; it came up on the Tor mailing list, for example, but did not spark any discussion. Joomla was also left out, and reported in a blog post that the GSoC team said it had "decided to give newer organizations a little more visibility in the program this year."

But fixating on which organizations are not included in the 2015 mentoring group can distract from who is included. Most of the major open-source participants are returning, such as Apache, GNU, X.Org, GNOME, KDE, and a number of Linux distributions. Moreover, the list of new participants is interesting reading in its own right. It includes several well-known projects, such as CentOS, jQuery, and GNU Mailman. There are also newer projects that might not have had large enough communities in past years to run an organized GSoC mentoring program, such as the Tox encrypted instant-messaging program and the lowRISC project, which aims to produce open-hardware system-on-chip (SoC) designs.

Several university-sponsored projects are included for the first time, like MBDyn (a multi-body physics simulation engine from the Polytechnic University of Milan) and JdeRobot (a robotics development platform from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid).

The largest group of new participants, however, seems to be from the biology and medical fields. That list includes:

Bika, a laboratory-management system
The Department of Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook University
The Encyclopedia of Life, a biological database
The Global Alliance for Genomics & Health, a clinical data-sharing organization
MEDES, a research group working on (among other things) space medicine
OncoBlocks, a clinical "big data" warehouse project
The Helikar Lab at the University of Nebraska, a computational biology project

As is often the case, the accepted mentoring organizations represent an intriguing slice of the wider open-source-software community. It can be quite fascinating to see just how many fields of study and areas of development now rely on open-source software.

As for the well-known organizations who were not included in this year's mentoring group, there is little cause for concern. Other projects have left and returned in years past, and although 137 organizations is certainly a hefty batch of participants, that number is still a reduction from last year's count: 190, the largest list in GSoC's ten-year history.

Plus, there are still numerous opportunities that an interested student could find to do work that benefits projects not on the list. Xiph.org, for example, is supported in its codec-development work by Mozilla, and there are multiple projects that offer kernel-related project ideas (BeagleBoard, QEMU, and the XIA networking project, to name just a few).

Now that the mentoring organizations have been announced, GSoC will soon enter the next phase: selecting the student participants from the pool of applicants. Students interested in participating can register starting on March 16. The deadline for applications is March 27, with the selections to follow a few weeks after that.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a robustly maintained "master list" of other open-source coding internship programs. The Opportunities page at the OpenHatch wiki comes the closest, but it relies on user contributions to keep its information and links up to date, with the usual caveats that accompany a wiki. There are a lot of coding opportunities out there in addition to GSoC, and GSoC's continued dominance on the topic in the online news space perhaps just serves to illustrate how much demand there is for programming internships such as these.