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After a long winter, a young software developer feels a stirring in the bones. It’s an urge to go inside a room — possibly dark and windowless — and spend most of the summer writing code.
At least, that’s what Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) hopes. On a trip to Google’s Cambridge office last week, Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source program manager, talked about the Summer of Code, the Mountain View, Calif., company’s global open-source internship program.
“Schools are often very good at teaching programming,” DiBona said. “But what they’re bad at is introducing people to actual development problems. The open-source world has real development problems. It has users in multiple platforms that want features and have issues and have found bugs.”
With a $5 million budget, Summer of Code 2009 opened applications this week through April 3 for its fifth year, offering slots for 1,000 college and university students at 150 open-source organizations worldwide.
One of those is Sugar Laboratories Inc., a spinoff from the MIT-incubated One Laptop Per Child Association Inc. that is developing Sugar, a version of its child-friendly desktop platform that is designed to run on any operating system. “Essentially it’s a replacement for the desktop,” said executive director Walter Bender, of Cambridge.
The nonprofit organization’s latest project is Sugar on a Stick, a version of Linux-based Sugar scheduled for release later this year that will install on a USB drive of one gigabyte or more in size, Bender said. When plugged in at startup, the software is designed to pre-empt any computer’s existing operating system with a low-profile OS suitable for donated machines and older, slower machines.
“It’s causing us to put together a little more structure around our whole mentoring program,” said Bender, a senior researcher at MIT who is on sabbatical to work on the Sugar project. “We’re not going to be restricted to just the number of students who come in from the Google Summer of Code program, but we’ll have the structured program where we’ll be able to absorb students from all over the world.”
The number of internships has narrowed this year from 1,200 last year, said Summer of Code program manager Leslie Hawthorn. She said economic concerns were not a factor. Instead, the narrowing was an effort to distill the quality of the program, she said.
Students accepted to New England organizations may not actually come to New England. Joshua Gay, who was a Cambridge-based Summer of Code mentor last year, originally joined the program as a student two years ago, working remotely with a mentor from the SAHANA disaster management system in Sri Lanka.
“I realized that although developing software is one important aspect of Summer of Code, I felt that the more important thing would be working with individuals in this tight-knit relationship to help guide them along,” said Gay, now a content manager for the CK-12 Foundation, a California-based open-source textbook project.
Gay, now a programmer for the CK-12 Foundation, a California-based open-source textbook project, volunteered to return as a mentor. “I realized that although developing software is one important aspect of Summer of Code, I felt that the more important thing would be working with individuals in this tight-knit relationship to help guide them along,” he said.
Perfection is not necessarily a goal of the program, Hawthorn said. Last year, 7,000 students applied for the Summer of Code’s limited number of slots. The successful ones weren’t necessarily spotless, but were willing to address potential pitfalls in their projects.
“In general the most successful students are those who are really good about being self-directed and rolling up their sleeves and not being afraid to break stuff,” she said.
An earlier online version of this article misstated Joshua Gay’s title at CK-12 and his role with Google’s Summer of Code. He is a content developer at CK-12. Although he was a Summer of Code mentor in 2008, he is not returning to be a mentor in 2009.
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