What is GSoC ?

You can read about GSoC in their website, but I will try to resume here what is GSoC.

Google pays you (a student) US$ 4500,00 for three months of work on a free/open source software.

First the organizations apply for GSoC as a mentoring organization. Each organization accepted by Google receive slots and distribute this slots in project ideas.

Then the student find a mentoring organization, choose a project (or propose a new one) and asks for a mentor (applying). The organization will choose the students and then monitor the student work. Note that a student can apply for 20 projects but if approved in more than one he will need to choose only one to work.

The student will receive from Google US$ 500,00 when the program starts, then US$ 2000,00 after a month of work and US$ 2000,00 when the program finishes. Obviously the mentor will check the student process/work and decide if he should receive the money or not.

When the student finishes the program, he receives a GSoC t-shirt and a Google certificate (nice! ).

Benefits

For students (like me):

• Contribute do free/open source software
• Learn and gain experience
• Get paid to code free/open source software
• A beautiful t-shirt
• think about your new job offers …

For organizations (like Python Software Foundation):

• More people involved in the development process
• People getting paid to develop needed features

I’m applying for BlueZ, the project idea is simple, build a high-level interface/layer upon python-dbus to provide the services/interfaces offered by BlueZ by D-Bus.

I’ll probably try to apply to OLPC as well.

I’m also applying (maybe too late) for Python Software Foundation to work on PyPy. The project idea is to support CPython 2.5 features and changes missing in PyPy.

For more information in GSoC I recommend watching this screencast by Titus Brown.

That’s all.