The NetBSD Foundation Press Release: Announcing NetBSD and the Google "Summer of Code" Projects

June 26, 2005  When Google announced the “Summer of Code”, its program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development, the NetBSD Project understood the value of this project and entered as a mentoring organization. Over a period of two weeks, students researched the list of possible projects and discussed their proposals on the public mailing lists and in private with developers and other users alike. After evaluating over 100 distinct applications, the NetBSD Foundation is now pleased to announce the list of projects that have been chosen:

“We are very excited to be taking part in the Summer of Code”, says Jan Schaumann, the NetBSD Foundation's main point of contact for this project. “The quality of the selected proposals was very impressive and we are looking forward to guiding the students to fulfill the high expectations implied by NetBSD's mentorship so that we can hopefully integrate the results into our code base at the end of the summer.”

“As you can tell from the list of chosen projects, there are a lot of things that will not only benefit NetBSD, but that will be immensely useful for the entire open source community, and our permissive license should allow anybody to benefit from these efforts”, he continues. “Similarly, we are looking forward to seeing results from the other participating mentor organizations, especially our sister project, FreeBSD, as a number of proposals on both our list overlap or are of obviously mutual interest. Many thanks to Google for this great contribution and for their support of Open Source!”.

In each accepted project, the student will work closely together with the entire NetBSD community under the supervision of at least one senior NetBSD developer, who will guide the student and introduce them into the world of Open Source Software Development.

In order to centralize the different projects and to reduce the administration overhead for each -- and thus giving the students more time to work on the problems themselves -- an umbrella project entitled “NetBSD-SoC” has been set up on the popular Sourceforge website. It will function as a common meeting point for mentors and students as well as a repository, in which all code and documentation generated by the students will be made publicly available.

Hubert Feyrer, who coordinates the NetBSD Summer of Code efforts together with Jan Schaumann, reminds all applicants that the decision process was not easy: “Having to choose only 8 proposals out of over 100 was tough. We, the developers, had to evaluate each individual application based on a number of criteria, such as feasibility of the proposed project, ability and experience of the student in the research area, importance and relevance of the result to the NetBSD Project etc. etc.”

“Unfortunately, due to the limited number of spots available to us, we had to decide against a number of very good proposals. However, we want to strongly encourage everybody who submitted a proposal to follow through and work with the NetBSD community to finish the project, even if not as part of the Summer of Code. As rewards await a great learning opportunity, the satisfaction resulting from contributing to a significant Open Source project and seeing ones code be used by thousands of people and of course a great reputation should a similar contest be held in the future.”

NetBSD, a free, secure, and highly portable descendant of the BSD UNIX family, is one of the oldest open source operating systems. It is available for many platforms, from 64-bit Opteron machines and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments; its source is freely available under an unencumbering business-friendly open source license. More information is available at http://www.NetBSD.org/.

To learn more about Google, the “Summer of Code” and other Open Source projects within Google, visit http://www.google.com/, http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html and http://code.google.com/.

The NetBSD Foundations Summer of Code project page is available at http://NetBSD-SoC.sourceforge.net/.

-Hubert Feyrer

The NetBSD Foundation