Something to read while it's hanging in the announce admin's queue.

Anyone wanting to sponsor further students for similar conditions 
like Google ($4500 per student, $500 for the mentoring organisation) 
please donate to TNF and indicate to use if for SoC projects! :)


  - Hubert

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 03:44:59 +0200 (CEST)
From: Hubert Feyrer <hubertf@NetBSD.org>
To: netbsd-announce@NetBSD.org
Subject: Announcing NetBSD and the Google "Summer of Code" Projects


  * Announcing NetBSD and the Google "Summer of Code" Projects

When Google announced the ``Summer of Code'', its program designed to
introduce students to the world of open source software development,
the NetBSD Project immediately 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:

  1. Project: Efficient memory file-system
     Student: Julio M. Merino Vidal
     Mentor: Luke Mewburn
     Mentor: Bill Studenmund

  2. Project: Wide Character Support for Curses
     Student: Ruibiao Qiu
     Mentor: Julian Coleman
     Mentor: Brett Lymn

  3. Project: BSD licenses privacy guard (pgp)
     Student: Manuel Freire
     Mentor: Alistair Crooks
     Mentor: Curt Sampson

  4. Project: Zeroconfd
     Student: Silvio Valenti
     Mentor: Christos Zoulas
     Mentor: David Young
     Mentor: Jason R. Thorpe
     Mentor: Ignatios Souvatzis

  5. Project: Regression testing
     Student: Chetan S Patil
     Mentor: Martin Husemann

  6. Project: Userspace file system hooks
     Student: Antti Kantee
     Mentor: Bill Studenmund

  7. Project: NDIS network driver
     Student: Alan Ritter
     Mentor: Phil Nelson

  8. Project: HFS+
     Student: Yevgeny Binder
     Mentor: Bill Studenmund

``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 her
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 XXX 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