There have been some exciting developments from our Google Summer of Code and Haiku Code Drive students, even though it is only the first of three month. Here's a brief summary from most of the students. Be sure to visit their blogs for additional information and the occasional screenshot.

In the past few days, there has been two important developments regarding our participating students.

This year for Haiku Code Drive, the student selection process has been completely overhauled. Unlike last year, where a public vote was held to select the students, our mentors have determined the combinations of <student>-<project>-<mentor>. Since our requirements for Google Summer of Code were greatly improved upon from last year, our mentors were able to confidently decide which of those combinations have the highest chance of succeeding.

In celebration and recognition of the hard work put in by all of this year's Google Summer of Code applicants, several of Haiku's news sites have coordinated with each other to provide those students with an opportunity to be interviewed. These interviews will be covered by BeOSNews, BeGroovy, Haiku Gazette, Haikuware, and IsComputerOn, and will be spread out over the following two weeks.

Update: All of the received interviews have now been posted! I would like to congratulate and thank all of the participating newsites on this extensive collaboration effort. If any additional translations become available, feel free to Contact Me

Update: IsComputerOn has conducted another interview with Alexey Burshtein

We are pleased to announce that Google has allotted us with six students for this year's Summer of Code program! This is quite an achievement, seeing as how Google accepted only 1000 students, which is about 10% less than in 2008. As with the year before, the quality of the proposals submitted by students has increased significantly. This year, students who applied to Haiku were suggested to fix an issue in our bug tracker. This provided our mentors with a glimpse into the students' programming ability, as well as their ambition. Those contributions, several of which have already been committed to our SVN repository, proved to be a valuable resource when ranking the students. This allowed our mentors to strike a balance between projects that fill a need in Haiku and projects by students who have also shown themselves to be a worthy Google Summer of Code student. These students went above and beyond our requirements and expectations. They gave us hope that come October, November, and beyond, they will still be making contributions to our community. Since retaining students as community developers is one of the goals of Summer of Code, it weighed heavily in our decision. Without further ado, here is the list of students who will be sponsored by Google to contribute to Haiku in Google's Summer of Code 2009:

Haiku GSoC 2009 flier (pdf & hi res PNG)

Haiku's application for Google Summer of Code 2009™ has been accepted!

This year, the role of Haiku's Google Summer of Code primary administrator has been taken up by Matt Madia, with Stephan Aßmus acting as the backup administrator. Over the past few days, Google program administrators evaluated a total of 395 Mentoring organization applications and published their list of those accepted on Wednesday, March 18th 19:00 UTC. As you may imagine, time had seemingly slowed to a crawl in anticipation of the results!

As usual, we have created a list of suggested ideas. We encourage interested students to begin considering possible projects and more importantly to engage yourself in our community!

Here's some anecdotal data involving Google Summer of Code from the past and this year. The number of mentoring organizations has grown from 40 in 2005, to 100, to 130, and up to 175 in 2008. There were roughly 500 mentoring applications in 2008, however a good portion of those were "spammy" and does not represent an accurate count of actual applications. Google's application process this year has greatly reduced the number of "spammy" applications. The number of participating students in 2005 was 400 and has grown over the years to 1125 as of last year. For this year, Google will be establishing a cap of around 1000 students for 2009.

If you happen to be visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage conference on March 14-15, 2009, make sure to stop by the Haiku booth and say "Hi!". Attending this year on behalf of Haiku will be Stephan Aßmus, Axel Dörfler, Denise Wein and Daniel Wünsch.

The Haiku booth is next to the one of the Fedora Linux project, together with many other open source operating systems like FreeBSD, Ubuntu, openSUSE, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.

The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are an event around the topic Linux and open source for everyone. The entrance ticket costs 5 EUR for both days (3 EUR for students). The event will be held at the following location:

Universität Chemnitz
Reichenhainer Straße 90
Chemnitz, 09126