The NetBSD Foundation Press Release: Announcing NetBSD and the Google "Summer of Code" Projects 2007

April 17, 2007  The NetBSD Project is glad to participate in the Google ``Summer of Code'' for the third time in a row as a mentoring organization and is pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer. The Google ``Summer of Code'' is designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development, to create new Open Source programs and to help currently established projects.

  1. Project: Automated Testing Framework

    Student: Julio M. Merino Vidal

    Mentor: Martin Husemann

  2. Project: Porting ZFS

    Student: Oliver Gould

    Mentor: Dieter Baron

  3. Project: A Framework For Enforcing QoS Inside the NetBSD UVM

    Student: Sumantra R. Kundu

    Mentor: William Stouder-Studenmund

  4. Project: Running Kernel File Systems in Userspace

    Student: Antti Kantee

    Mentor: William Stouder-Studenmund

  5. Project: Improving the pkgsrc Build System

    Student: Jörg Sonnenberger

    Mentor: Johnny C. Lam

  6. Project: Hardware Monitoring and HAL Port

    Student: Jachym Holecek

    Mentor: Quentin Garnier

“As in previous years, competition among students was high, and the selection process was very difficult. Based on our experience from 2005 and 2006, we tried to offer students more guidance in developing their applications before even submitting them by providing much more precise levels of difficulty, more exact expectations and in general more fine-grained suggested proposals.” says Martin Husemann, one of the NetBSD Project's ``Summer of Code'' administrators. “As a result, we received fewer total applications in this year's ``Summer of Code'' than in previous years. On the other hand, the overall quality of nearly all applications was significantly higher than most of the applications received in previous years.”

Together with the limited number of slots available to the NetBSD Project, this put the NetBSD developers in the difficult position of having to rank numerous high-quality applications and ultimately picking only the few proposals listed above.

“The ranking of the proposals was more difficult, and while it's too bad that we weren't able to accept more of the great proposals we received, we are still quite happy with the six projects that were selected. In the end, we prefer quality over quantity.” says Jan Schaumann, who, together with Martin Husemann, continues the administration of the NetBSD Project's participation in this year's ``Summer of Code''.

“As with in previous years, we hope to have selected the most qualified students and are looking forward to working with them on these important projects. At the same time, we are of course encouraging all applicants to work with us in the spirit of Open Source even if they do not get funding through Google.”

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/.

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/.

-Jan Schaumann

The NetBSD Foundation

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