On Thursday, May 4th, the official announcement of accepted projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) was released.  Fedora is proud to be one of the selected participating organizations and we’re pleased to announce who will spend the summer hacking on Fedora-related projects!

What is Google Summer of Code?

In case you’ve never heard of the program, you can head to the GSoC homepage. The sub-title on the page sums it up perfectly:

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school.

That basically means Google, together with FLOSS organizations, selects many talented students. These students are offered the oportunity to have an internship with the FLOSS organization.  The students are paid a stipend by Google to allow them to keep their summer free for the internship.

Google started the program in 2005 and Fedora has been participating since 2006. That means this is the eleventh year Fedora has taken part! Last year, a total of 1,206 students were accepted, 10 of whom were with Fedora.

What projects were accepted?

This year, a total of 1317 students have been accepted and six of them will be working on different Fedora or Fedora-related projects. The areas of those projects can’t be summed up easily so we’re linking to their proposal pages directly (for those who didn’t forget to put it on the wiki). If you’re not in the mood to read them at this point, worry not, a follow-up post will contain a short gist of their proposals.

Now without further a do, here is a list of the 6 students!

What happens next?

Now is the time for community bonding which means the students will now set up their Fedora accounts, start hanging around on the IRC channels, mailing lists and get the overall feel of the Fedora community, while also setting up their blogs to write about their progress during the summer.  This is also the time for you to make friends with them and welcome them to our community.

It is also the time to start setting up their development environment and they can even start sending small patches to their respective projects.

However, the actual coding part (that is, hacking away on what’s included in the proposal) will start on 30th of May and ends on 21st of August.

In a follow-up post, we’ll bring you the links to their blogs, along with the students’ introductions.