Q. Google recently announced their fourth Summer of Code. Does the Summer of Code project provide any value to open source projects and the students who participate?
A. While the amount of value will vary between the open source projects who participate, I can provide statistics for the FreeBSD project. When the Fourth Annual Google Summer of Code (SoC) was announced, it got me wondering about the 58 students that participated with the FreeBSD project for SoC for the years 2005, 2006, and 2007. I sent out an email to find out what they're currently up to and was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of the responses. From pursuing grad school and even post-docs, to founding start-ups, or working in established industry companies (Oracle, Cisco, Google), our SoC students have pursued a variety of paths since completing their projects.
Perhaps the largest number of SoC alumni are currently in graduate school. Ivan Voras and Fabio Checconi continue to pursue Ph.D. studies and work with FreeBSD in areas related to their original SoC work. Ru-Gang Xu is nearing completion of his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. Matus Harvan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Information Security at ETH Zurich. Zhouyi Zhou is a Ph.D student in Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences and has recently written a paper about static analysis on the MAC (Mandatory Access Control) framework with FreeBSD core team member Robert Watson.
Alexey Tarasov is a Ph.D. student working part-time at the Computing Center at Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Jesper Rosenkilde is studying for an M.Sc. in mathematics and computer science and working as a department system administrator. Constantine A. Murenin is pursuing an MMath at the University of Waterloo and is a full fledged OpenBSD committer that also continues to follow FreeBSD. Nanjun Li is pursuing a postdoc in the University of Edinburgh. His current research focuses on wireless sensor networks and a related application called Firegrid. Maxim Zhuravlev worked on the Generic Input Device Layer for SoC 2007 which has since moved to a more general Enhanced NewBus project.
Emily Boyd from 2005 SoC has co-founded an online task management service, Remember The Milk. Roman Divacky successfully graduated and is now employed in Unix development and still involved with FreeBSD. Christoph Mathys is working at Lucerne University. Victor Cruceru is a Software Engineer at Oracle's European Development Center doing UNIX porting and integration. Garrett Cooper is working for Cisco and credits his FreeBSD SoC experience in helping him land that job. After two successful SoCs, Chris Jones went on to join Google's Site Reliability Engineering team in Mountain View, California.
And finally, the following 9 students were given full commit access to the FreeBSD source code repository to facilitate their continuing development work on FreeBSD after the SoC ended : Michael Bushkov, Ulf Lilleengen, Kai Wang, Rui Paulo, Attilio Rao, Gábor Kövesdán, Paolo Pisati, Shteryana Shopova, and Roman Divacky.