Celebrating young computer scientists

7/17/2008 01:30:00 PM

Last week, the ten grand prize winners for the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our initiative to get pre-university students involved in open source development. We were very excited to welcome these burgeoning computer scientists and their families to Silicon Valley in a celebration of their many accomplishments.

Our grand prize winners and the Open Source team

Chosen from more than 350 students worldwide, our winners created software, documentation and marketing materials for ten different open source projects, getting all this work accomplished in just over two months. For more details, including interviews with the winners and their mentors, check out the Google Open Source Blog.

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager - Open Source

OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!

3/25/2008 07:15:00 AM

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Last November, OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality. Sites including MySpace and orkut have begun to provide OpenSocial applications to their users, and hi5 will be rolling out next week.

Today we're pleased that Yahoo! has announced its support for OpenSocial. We're looking forward to having Yahoo! users join the hundreds of millions of people who will soon enjoy OpenSocial applications. This addition means even more distribution for developers, encourages participation by even more websites, and, most importantly, results in more features for users all across the web.

In addition, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google are joining with the broader community to create a non-profit foundation to foster the continued open development of OpenSocial. To that end, we've also launched OpenSocial.org, designed to become the main documentation hub and primary source of information about OpenSocial. To learn more, and to get involved, please review the foundation proposal.

With that, welcome, Yahoo! We look forward to growing the social web together.

Summer of Code is back!

3/03/2008 12:51:00 PM

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source

Google Summer of Code, our program to introduce students to open source software development is coming back. In the past three years, we've seen more than 1500 students 'graduate' from this program, working with 2000+ mentors across 90 countries to produce millions of lines of code. We're pleased to have funded more than $10M in open source development through Summer of Code, and we've increased our funding for it this year by another $1M.

Last year alone, more than 800 students successfully completed their projects. Each received $4500 as a stipend and an awesome T-shirt. We're looking forward to welcoming even more student participants and open source projects into the Google Summer of Code community this year.

We're accepting applications from open source projects who'd like to act as mentoring organizations through March 13th, and will begin taking student applications on March 24th. If you're interested in learning more, just subscribe to the program discussion list. We hope to see you there!

New Open Source Programs blog

2/12/2008 12:58:00 PM

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source Team

Since its inception in 2005, our Open Source Programs Office has been responsible for maintaining license compliance within Google. And over the past three years, our mission has grown encompass even more activities that we hope are useful to our colleagues in the open source community: project hosting, releasing Google created code and funding open source development. We've also continued to get students involved in open source, recently debuting the Google Highly Open Participation Contest for secondary schoolers as a complement to our university program, Google Summer of Code.

When you have this much good news to share, you just have to create your own blog --so we did. Come check out the new Google Open Source Blog for regular updates on all of the above and, if you like what you see, subscribe.