Google Summer of Code has been around since 2005. In the program, Google partners with open source software projects and technology-based groups to fund students interested in working on real world software development for three months. Students gain good experience and advising from mentors while the tech groups get specific projects developed while increasing the developer base for the open source community.
Students 18 and older are able to apply for Google Summer of Code projects and since 2005 over 6,000 students have participated with over 3000 mentors from around the world. Google provides $5,000 to the student developer and $500 to the mentoring organization. The GSoC 2012 midterms occurred earlier this month and everybody is hard at work.
You can learn more about Google Summer of Code from the GSoC page on Google Code. Every year has its own separate site as well, so you can learn more about what students are working on this Summer from the Google Summer of Code 2012 site with program details on the FAQ page.
Most interesting, in my opinion, you can view the accepted projects that have a student and mentoring organization assigned. You can see the over 1,000 projects being worked on with organizations like the Apache Software Foundation, Battle for Wesnoth, BOINC project, Code for America, Drupal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, FreeBSD, Gnome, Joomla!, KDE, Linux, Mozilla, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, Python, Twitter, Wikimedia, and tons more.
View the full list of participants and what components the student are working on with Google Summer of Code 2012 and look forward to the enhancements in some of your favorite open-source projects.
