[FreeBSD-Announce] Google / FreeBSD Summer of Code application period now open

[Robert Watson]

   Summer of Code - Get Paid to Work on Open Source This Summer

Google Summer of Code is an exciting opportunity for students to "intern" with 
an open source project for a summer. The FreeBSD Project, as one of the most 
successful and oldest open source projects, is an excellent place to do this 
internship. Founded in 1993, the project now consists of several hundred 
"committers" and tens of thousands of contributors. FreeBSD is the foundation 
for many commercial products, including Apple's Mac OS X, NetApp's OnTap/GX, 
Juniper's JunOS, as well countless other products, from Cisco anti-spam 
appliances to Isilon's cluster storage hardware, and is widely used in the 
Internet Service Provider and corporate IT worlds. Many of these sponsors 
participate daily in the FreeBSD community, and students have the opportunity 
to develop software in an exciting environment with many real world 
applications, and under the mentorship of experienced developers.

After the summer ends, many of our students are sponsored by Google or the 
FreeBSD Foundation to attend operating systems and open source conferences to 
present on their work, and a significant number go on to become FreeBSD 
developers. It's also a great job networking opportunity!

There are many dozens of example project ideas listed on the FreeBSD web site 
here:

   http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode.html

and for many other open source organizations as well:

   http://code.google.com/soc

Some of the example projects include working on embedded operating systems, 
unix filesystems, network performance and implementing new network protocols, 
and more.  Most sample project ideas include developers you can contact to 
discuss a proposal, and we recommend doing so in advance of submitting a 
proposal.  Strong C language skills are recommended for most projects.