Summer of Code 2006 is a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period. The inaugural instance of the program, which took place last summer, brought together 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations from 49 countries. We'd like to include even more organizations and participants this year.
The program's goals are to inspire young developers and provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer, and to support existing open source projects and organizations. Since we're looking to find developers around the world (many of whom may have considered creating open source software but havent yet taken the plunge), we felt that concentrating on the student population was a good place to focus our efforts. Further, since no single organization could possibly mentor hundreds of students working on disparate projects, we thought it made sense to spread the work throughout the open source and free software community. We also think that the Apache Software Foundation (for instance) knows a lot more about what an Apache project needs than Google does and is more likely to ensure that an applicant gets the right kind of guidance so they can create acceptable code.