The NetBSD Foundation Press Release: Announcing NetBSD and the Google "Summer of Code" Projects 2008

April 21, 2008  For the fourth consecutive year, the NetBSD Project is proud to participate in Google's “Summer of Code” program as a mentoring organization and is pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer. As in previous years, the task of selecting a limited number of projects from over 50 student applications wasn't easy. With almost as many mentors signed up as student applications, ranking was done based on a number of criteria such as a students knowledge, interest and enthusiasm, the scope and detail of the proposal, the likeliness of the project succeeding etc.

In the end, the following projects were selected, listed in alphabetical order by the student's last name:

  1. Project: Implement Ext3 file system support

    Student: Rus-Rebreanu Alin-Florin

    Mentor: Alistair Crooks

  2. Project: Create an in-kernel API for "packet classes"

    Student: Anish

    Mentor: Herb Peyerl

  3. Project: File system access utilities

    Student: Ysmal Arnaud

    Mentor: Antti Kantee

  4. Project: wscons: Expansion for wstablet in NetBSD

    Student: Jason W. Beaudoin

    Mentor: Petra Zeidler

  5. Project: Subfile Support for NetBSD

    Student: Adam Burkepile

    Mentor: Philip Nelson

  6. Project: Hurd translators

    Student: Marek Dopiera

    Mentor: Aymeric Vincent

  7. Project: Write and improve NetBSD LVM driver

    Student: Adam Hamšik

    Mentor: Brett Lymn

  8. Project: Implementation of RFC4380 (Teredo) in NetBSD

    Student: Arnaud Lacombe

    Mentor: David Young

  9. Project: Add support for UVC devices (USB web-cams)

    Student: Patrick Mahoney

    Mentor: Jared D. McNeill

  10. Project: DVB drivers and kernel framework

    Student: Jeremy Morse

    Mentor: Jared D. McNeill

  11. Project: pkgsrc: rewrite wrapper framework in C

    Student: Amitai Schlair

    Mentor: Johnny Lam

  12. Project: Improve syslogd

    Student: Martin Schütte

    Mentor: Christos Zoulas

  13. Project: Converting remaining regression tests to the Automatic Testing Framework

    Student: Lukasz Strzygowski

    Mentor: Julio Manuel Merino Vidal

  14. Project: Updated, customizable install tool for NetBSD

    Student: Zachary Wegner

    Mentor: Tim Rightnour

The NetBSD Project is proud and thankful to be awarded a significantly increased number of slots by Google in this year's Summer of Code compared to the previous years and all mentors will be working hard to ensure the success of their projects. The distribution of projects may provide our users with some interesting insights into the long-lasting benefits of the Summer of Code program:

  • Two of the primary mentors in this year's Summer of Code were successful students themselves in previous years, passing the torch and allowing new students to benefit from the project in the same way they did

  • Only three of the accepted students already are NetBSD developers, increasing the number of new potential developers (ie “new blood”) introduced into the NetBSD community by 11.

  • Eight of the primary mentors in this year's Summer of Code have not mentored any projects in previous years, showing an increased interest in the developer pool to participate and guide students, to help shape new developers

In the next couple of days, the students will prepare their project webpages, blogs and other outlets of information, introduce themselves and their project to the NetBSD community during the community bonding period before they start their exciting new work.

As in previous years, a number of very promising applications did not make the cut, and the NetBSD Project would be very happy to accept donations to make it possible to fund some of these projects outside the Google Summer of Code program. Likewise, students are of course encouraged to join the NetBSD community and work with us regardless of immediate monetary benefits.

-Jan Schaumann

The NetBSD Foundation

About NetBSD:
NetBSD, a free, secure, and highly portable descendant of the BSD UNIX family, is one of the oldest open source operating systems. It is available for many platforms, from 64-bit Opteron machines and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments; its source is freely available under an unencumbering business-friendly open source license. More information is available at http://www.NetBSD.org/.

About Google's “Summer of Code”:
To learn more about Google, the ``Summer of Code'' and other Open Source projects within Google, visit http://www.google.com, http://code.google.com/soc/ and http://code.google.com.

The NetBSD Foundations ``Summer of Code'' project page is available at http://NetBSD-SoC.sourceforge.net/.

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