OSGeo projects at Google Summer of Code
| Anne Ghisla |
|---|
| via Biasi 2 |
| 38010 San Michele all'Adige |
| +393408627544 |
Keywords: GRASS GIS, Google, GSoC, OSGeo
Contents |
Abstract
OSGeo has participated since 2007 to Google Summer of Code (GSoC), as an umbrella organisation for its various incubating and graduated projects. GSoC is a global program addressed to university students, who develop new features during a three-month paid internship.
The participation is open to students interested in open source geospatial software development, with a minimum programming background. The project ideas can come both from the developers, who wish to see a particular feature developed by a student, and from students who propose their own ideas. The discussion is open in the months preceding the SoC, so actually would-be mentors and students write the proposals together.
In most cases the accepted students create external add-on modules, that can be later integrated to main source code. Each student is helped mainly by one or more experienced developers, and also by the whole community. The student is introduced to real-world open source programming, as it doesn't usually happen during university studies.
As an example, the GSoC projects developed so far for GRASS GIS included a broad variety of topics (wxGUI, 3D visualisation, parallelisation, hydrology...), according to the users' feedback and the developers' areas of interest.
It is important to know that GSoC is not a full picture of what open source development is. The students are not allowed to work in groups on the code, whereas in real work it's a common practice. The final product can't be documentation or translation, but has to be mainly code; it can convey the false picture that coding is valuable as paid work, and the rest is a plus.
Besides these specific constraints, GSoC triggers positive growth of the developer's community, that improves the process of welcoming new contributors. If the project can make the student able to code after a month of learning the structure of the project and the needed libraries, it means that it can accept contributors easily enough to ensure a sufficient number of developers over time.
The students get to know better how open source development works, and are likely to stay in contact with the community and continue contributing to OSGeo projects after the end of Summer of Code.
