When Chris DiBona started at Google last year as its “open-source program manager,” he found out quickly that he was not just a token ambassador to a peripheral constituency. In just a few months, Mr. DiBona was able to turn a vague idea about supporting student programmers into a full-fledged, funded summer program addressing the real needs of the open-source community.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—who developed their first search algorithms while studying at Stanford University—told him they wanted some way to support young geeks, and hey, maybe it could tie into open source at the same time. “The founders have long thought it’s a shame when people who are interested in computer programming have to do other jobs during the summer to pay for college,” says Mr. DiBona. With that grievance as his guide, 33-year-old Mr. DiBona, a veteran advocate of open source, came up with a scheme of farming out coding projects to various open-source organizations and paying both students and mentors a stipend. The “Summer of Code” got the thumbs up—and $1 million to pay 200 students $4,500 (if their projects were successfully completed by September) and their mentors $500.
Once the project was posted on Google’s web site in May, news traveled fast. The original eight mentoring groups—all friends of Mr. DiBona—grew to 41, nearly overnight. Then 8,744 students applied, some for mentor-proposed projects and some for their own ideas. Mr. DiBona received clearance to more than double the allotments, to 419 spots, without reducing payments. At press time, the results of the projects were still being evaluated, but most students seem to have completed their tasks. Chances look good that the program will be repeated next year.
Winning Hearts
Google, whose playful image has suffered in the last year as its market cap has ballooned, might look reckless for throwing $2 million at code that it will never own. But rather than earmark that money for charity or a public relations campaign, showing a little bit of goodwill to the geek crowd—even if somewhat haphazardly—could go a long way. The company’s leadership obviously likes the feeling of playing the role of benevolent university rather than corporate machine. Plus, Google uses the Linux kernel and plenty of open-source code, and it always wants to know about young developer talent, points out Mr. DiBona, so some benefits are more direct. “Some of these kids have done such a good job that we’d be fools not to hire them,” he says.
And that kind of money is a significant infusion for open source. It means an emerging project like Drupal, a content management platform run by Belgian students that mentored 10 Summer of Code participants, can get the equivalent of “hiring a highly qualified developer for an entire year to work for us,” says Robert Douglass, an American developer in Germany who spearheaded Drupal’s involvement. “Fifty-thousand dollars earmarked for Drupal development—that’s really astounding.”
Furthermore, the goodwill hasn’t rung false with Google’s skeptics. “Before, I [wasn’t sure] how Google was going to interact with the open-source world,” says Behbad Esfahbod, one of only 15 percent of the Summer of Code participants who had previously been involved in open-source development. “After this, I’m pretty positive.” Mr. Esfahbod, a 23-year-old Iranian finishing his masters’ degree in computer science at the University of Toronto, got his start in open source by enabling it to run Persian and Arabic languages. His summer project for mentor Fedora Core speeds up application launches by pre-fetching them based on a user’s habits. While he’s finishing his thesis on the topic, he says he’s now applying for a job at Google.
Around the World
Another participant, Samantha Kleinberg, spent her summer improving the interface to the Gene Ontology database, a tool for genetics researchers. The 22-year-old fifth-year senior at New YorkUniversity worked in her school’s bioinformatics lab with researcher Marco Antoniotti, who helped her win one of the nine $4,500 grants awarded by Google to Lisp NYC, a local open-source advocacy group.
Ms. Kleinberg, who plans to spend some of her earnings on knitting supplies, never met any of the other eight students working with Lisp NYC; nor, for that matter, did she encounter the other 418 Summer of Code participants. She’s one of only 5 percent of students who ever met their mentors in person, says Mr. DiBona.
And that may be the most innovative and rewarding aspect of Google’s expensive little experiment; the company is functioning as a university as it creates a new kind of distributed lab. The Summer of Code students essentially sat in front of their personal computers in 49 countries for two months. Each one’s communication methods might have included message boards, phone, VoIP, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and blogging—but hardly ever face-to-face conversations. “Developers should get used to the idea of globally distributed work groups all over the place, all over the time zones,” says Mr. DiBona. “It’s the future of software development.”