"Summer of Code" - Free Software student stipends ($4500!) from Google

[Bill Sconce]

Know any needy student hackers?  The deadline is June 14th.

This came up on the Python mailing lists today.  The Python
Software Foundation is one of the listed mentoring organizations.

This is an extremely cool, and public-spirited, and self-serving,
idea.

    http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html
    
    "The Summer of Code is Google's program designed to introduce
    students to the world of Open Source Software Development.

    "This Summer, don't let your programming skills lie fallow...Use
    them for the greater good of Open Source Software and computer
    science! Google will provide a $4500 award to each student who
    successfully completes an open source project by the end of the
    Summer. (payment details can be found in FAQ)

    "By pairing applicants up with the proven wisdom and experience
    of established prominent open source organizations (listed below),
    we hope to make great software happen..."

The mentoring organizations include heavy hitters from Apache and
Asterisk, to Perl and Python, to Wine and XWiki, and of course
Google themselves.