I’m pleased to have made it to another OSCON here in Portland. This year has been pretty hectic for me and for a long time it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to make it, but in the end things fell into place after all. Its good to here — the conference is once again packed with many great presentations. Even the BOFs are going to make it hard to ignore all the free beer at the many parties that are planned today and tomorrow. Ah, life is rough at the O’Reilly conferences.

After the morning keynotes I dropped into Chris DiBona’s presentation on Google’s Summer of code program. Chris presented the background of the program and then showed a number of slides that outlined what projects students are hacking on during their Summer of Code.

Google’s aim with the Summer of Code project is to support the open source world by giving money to students who propose to support interesting open source projects. Students from around the world file applications with Google to participate in the project — in these applications they outline what they plan do for their project, which existing open source projects its related to, and lots of other vital details like t-shirt size and favorite color.

Google then undertakes the arduous process of narrowing down these applications and selecting the best projects to participate in the Summer of Code. Mentors from the related projects then take on the selected students to help them out during the project and to monitor their progress.

Students chosen to participate in the project are paid $500 at the beginning of the project. $2000 is paid out at mid-term if their mentor decides that they have met the progress expectations. When the project concludes and the mentor approves the students work, the students get a final $2000. The mentor also get $500 for their role in mentoring the students.

Chris pointed out that $4500 may go a long way in some countries and less far in others. One Summer of Code participant chose to invest his money by starting a company and hiring two employees. That wouldn’t be possible in countries where the purchasing power of $4500 doesn’t go much beyond covering the costs of the roof over your head and pizza while you hack on the project.

Google didn’t sponsor any projects that were related to Google. The most popular projects supported in decreasing order were: KDE, Ubuntu, Python, Gnome, Apache, Boost, Gaim, GNU FSF and Drupal. Boost and Drupal were the clear surprises in this list and the list overall shows which projects did a great job in engaging their community and getting them to submit proposals to Google on their behalf.

Each project must also choose a license — the top licenses this year were: 48.0% GPL, 13.7% BSD, LGPL 12.7%. Compared to last year: GPL %41, BSD 18%, Apache 12%. The GPL still remains the heavy-weight open source license! The students also came from a wide range of majors besides computer science: Mechanical engineering, English literature, interior design, urban planning, astronomy, cartography, genetics, developmental psychology. This shows that OSS enjoys wide support in a many different fields — not only from computer science.

OSS also enjoys support from a wide array of countries, but with a heavy slant towards the US and Europe. By far the most applicants where from the US, followed by Germany and the UK. Other european countries were strong as was Brazil, but only a handful of entries were received from South Africa, with zero from central African nations. While a number of entries came from India and China, asia in general was not very well represented.

Chris threw out a number of other stats and graphs, but I didn’t manage to get them all down for you. I did however manage to get these overall stats:

  • 6338 applications received from
  • 3044 applicats
  • 1260 mentors
  • 630 students
  • 456 schools
  • 102 open source organizations
  • 90 countries

This shows that open source software has an impressive reach — it may not be well distributed, but it reaches into the far corners of the world. Thanks to Google for doing a second round of the $3M program and thanks to Chris for sharing these numbers. Quantifying open source adoption around the world is a good challenge and getting some hard numbers from this program is a refreshing relief form estimates created by various research firms.