What Google Gets Out Of The "Summer of Code"
I am excited that Jasig is preparing applications for the Google Summer of Code this year. I think this will be a great opportunity to get some new work done on uPortal and CAS and to bring some new people into the developer community.
In helping to prepare for this, I was reviewing the Terms Of Service for the program to make sure there weren't any issues for our communities or projects there. (Result: they seem fine.)
I was enlightened by one of the requirements since it finally helped me understand why Google actually runs this program. By joining in the Summer of Code program, the Student Participants must agree...
To allow Google to use the results of the Program, including the Mentor's evaluation of the participant, for recruiting purposes.
So now I get it -- the goal here is for Google to screen a bunch of possible future employees by having them work on real projects. Pretty clever! Just like a regular intern program, except they just put up the money and the rest of us do the work. All in all, I think this is a reasonably decent trade-off. I'm glad to see what the benefit is for Google as well as what the benefit is for the open source project and that all three parties are getting something useful out of this program.
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John Lewis
John A. Lewis is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon Inc, the leading independent provider of open source training, consulting, and support in higher education. John is an 18 year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions are large-scale enterprise architecture, open-source technologies, and agile software development methods. John has been working heavily in Java-based enterprise information portals since 2001 and is the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, which provides Java Portlet support in the Spring Framework. He is active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai. He also serves on the Jasig Board of Directors and the Sakai Product Council.
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