Google Summer of Code 2011 Results!

Hot summer of code
Students learned a lot, had fun
Everyone wins!

Friday August 26th 2011 marked the end of Google Summer of Code™ 2011 and, once again, Haiku did great with 4 out of the 8 initial students passing the final evaluation (7 were actually evaluated, 1 having unfortunately failed at midterm). The raw numbers might be a little bit deceiving, given that the fundamental goal of the program is ultimately to attract new contributors to the project; and early indications are pointing toward a success in that perspective.

Most projects are either already merged or are on their way to be. To summarize, here are the results of the eight projects :

• Mike Smith's additions to VirtualBox™ are already meeting or exceeding usability expectations.
  Sources are available here : GitHub
  
• Nathan Heisey brought our support of SDL up to the version 1.3. Haiku is also really thankful for the collaboration we had from the SDL project having Ryan 'icculus' Gordon co-mentoring this project.
  Sources are available here : BitBucket
  
• Gabriel Hartmann provided Haiku with a USB video driver for high-end webcams. His work has already found its way to Haiku's source tree; while not perfect yet, it should prove to be a good starting point for incremental work onward
  Link to the commit log : FreeLists.org
  
• Lastly but not the least, Sean Healy's project will enable 3rd party projects to access Be/Haiku's API with other langages than C++, namely Python and Perl.
  Sources are available here : OsDrawer
  

And to complete the coverage, those were the projects also being worked on :

• Jian Chiang's project meant to add xhci (USB 3) support to Haiku. His code can be found as part of revision 42511, as seen here : FreeLists.org
  
• Jack Laxson was working on a build system/server called Bâtisseur.
  Sources are available here : GitHub
  
• Ankur Sethi's goal for his Google Summer of Code project was to port ZFS over to Haiku.
  Sources are available here : GitHub
  
• Dario Casalinuovo was working on a Services server and Contacts files integration.
  Sources are available here : GitHub
  

A remarkable feat is the interest from most students to pursue their work in the following months and are becoming regular contributors.

We hope that while not all our students were successful in their short term project goals, that they all continue making progress in their growth into open source contributors.

Observations

There are some observations being made by Haiku's admins of this year program that might help enhance the success rate next year*.

Some of those observations are related to the timezone difference between the location of a student and its mentor, and the recurring issue of the slow start by some students, most often due to the not quite ended school session at the start of the program.

Those issues are amongst several topics that are going to be discussed with other organizations at the mentor summit later in october, where Matt, Jerome and I (Philippe aka stpere) will meet.

* If the Google Summer of Code program is reconducted and that Haiku is part of it, of course.