Seeking open source projects for Google Summer of Code 2019

Do you lead or represent a free or open source software organization? Are you seeking new contributors? (Who isn’t?) Do you enjoy the challenge and reward of mentoring new developers? Apply to be a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2019!

We are searching for open source projects and organizations to participate in the 15th annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a global program that draws university student developers from around the world to contribute to open source. Each student spends three months working on a coding project, with the support of volunteer mentors, for participating open source organizations from late May to August.

Last year 1,264 students worked with 206 open source organizations. Organizations include individual smaller and medium sized open source projects as well as a number of umbrella organizations with many sub-projects under them (Python Software Foundation, CERN, Apache Software Foundation).

You can apply to be a mentoring organization for GSoC starting today. The deadline to apply is February 6 at 20:00 UTC. Organizations chosen for GSoC 2019 will be publicly announced on February 26.

Please visit the program site for more information on how to apply and review the detailed timeline of important deadlines. We also encourage you to check out the Mentor Guide and our short video on why open source projects choose to apply to be a part of the program.

Best of luck to all of the project applicants!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

A new chapter for OSS-Fuzz

Cross-posted on the Google Security Blog.

Open source software (OSS) is extremely important to Google, and we rely on OSS in a variety of customer-facing and internal projects. We also understand the difficulty and importance of securing the open source ecosystem, and are continuously looking for ways to simplify it.

For the OSS community, we currently provide OSS-Fuzz, a free continuous fuzzing infrastructure hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. OSS-Fuzz uncovers security vulnerabilities and stability issues, and reports them directly to developers. Since launching in December 2016, OSS-Fuzz has reported over 9,000 bugs directly to open source developers.

In addition to OSS-Fuzz, Google's security team maintains several internal tools for identifying bugs in both Google internal and open source code. Until recently, these issues were manually reported to various public bug trackers by our security team and then monitored until they were resolved. Unresolved bugs were eligible for the Patch Rewards Program. While this reporting process had some success, it was overly complex. Now, by unifying and automating our fuzzing tools, we have been able to consolidate our processes into a single workflow, based on OSS-Fuzz. Projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz will benefit from being reviewed by both our internal and external fuzzing tools, thereby increasing code coverage and discovering bugs faster.

We are committed to helping open source projects benefit from integrating with our OSS-Fuzz fuzzing infrastructure. In the coming weeks, we will reach out via email to critical projects that we believe would be a good fit and support the community at large. Projects that integrate are eligible for rewards ranging from $1,000 (initial integration) up to $20,000 (ideal integration); more details are available here. These rewards are intended to help offset the cost and effort required to properly configure fuzzing for OSS projects. If you would like to integrate your project with OSS-Fuzz, please submit your project for review. Our goal is to admit as many OSS projects as possible and ensure that they are continuously fuzzed.

Once contacted, we might provide a sample fuzz target to you for easy integration. Many of these fuzz targets are generated with new technology that understands how library APIs are used appropriately. Watch this space for more details on how Google plans to further automate fuzz target creation, so that even more open source projects can benefit from continuous fuzzing.

Thank you for your continued contributions to the open source community. Let’s work together on a more secure and stable future for open source software.

By Matt Ruhstaller, TPM and Oliver Chang, Software Engineer, Google Security Team

The big reveal: Google Code-in 2018 winners and finalists

Our 9th consecutive year of Google Code-in (GCI) 2018 ended in mid-December. It was a very, very busy seven weeks for everyone – we had 3,124 students from 77 countries completing 15,323 tasks with a record 27 open source organizations!

Today, we are pleased to announce the Google Code-in 2018 Grand Prize Winners and Finalists with each organization. The 54 Grand Prize Winners from 19 countries completed an impressive 1,668 tasks between them while also helping other students during the contest.

Each of the Grand Prize Winners are invited to a four day trip to Google’s main campus and San Francisco offices in Northern California where they’ll meet Google engineers, meet one of the mentors they worked with during the contest, and enjoy some fun in California with the other winners. We look forward to seeing everyone later this year!

Country	# of Winners		Country	# of Winners
Cameroon	1		Romania	1
Canada	1		Russian Federation	1
Czech Republic	1		Singapore	1
Georgia	1		South Africa	1
India	18		Spain	2
Indonesia	1		Sri Lanka	1
Macedonia	1		Ukraine	2
Netherlands	1		United Kingdom	6
Philippines	1		United States	9
Poland	4

Finalists

And a big congratulations to our 108 Finalists from 26 countries who completed over 2,350 tasks during the contest. The Finalists will all receive a special hoodie to commemorate their achievements in the contest. This year we had 1 student named as a finalist with 2 different organizations!

A breakdown of the countries represented by our finalists can be found below. 

Country	# of Finalists		Country	# of Finalists
Canada	6		Philippines	1
China	2		Poland	15
Czech Republic	1		Russian Federation	2
Germany	1		Serbia	1
India	48		Singapore	2
Indonesia	2		South Korea	1
Israel	1		Spain	1
Kazakhstan	1		Sri Lanka	2
Luxembourg	1		Taiwan	1
Mauritius	2		Thailand	1
Mexico	1		United Kingdom	3
Nepal	1		United States	8
Pakistan	2		Uruguay	1

Mentors

This year we had 790 mentors dedicate their time and invaluable expertise to helping thousands of teenage students learn about open source by welcoming them into their communities. These mentors are the heart of GCI and the reason the contest continues to thrive. Mentors spend hundreds of hours answering questions, reviewing submitted tasks, and teaching students the basics and, in many cases, more advanced aspects of contributing to open source. GCI would not be possible without their enthusiasm and commitment.

We will post more statistics and fun stories that came from GCI 2018 here on the Google Open Source Blog over the next few months, so please stay tuned.

Congratulations to our Grand Prize Winners, Finalists, and all of the students who spent the last couple of months learning about, and contributing to, open source. We hope they will continue their journey in open source!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Wrapping up Google Code-in 2018

We are excited to announce the conclusion of the 9th annual Google Code-in (GCI), our global online contest introducing teenagers to the world of open source development. Over the years the contest has not only grown bigger, but also helped find and support talented young people around the world.

Here are some initial statistics about this year’s program:

• Total number of students completing tasks: 3,123*
• Total number of countries represented by students: 77
• Percentage of girls among students: 17.9% 

Below you can see the total number of tasks completed by students year over year:

*These numbers will increase as mentors finish reviewing the final work submitted by students this morning.

Mentors from each of the 27 open source organizations are now busy reviewing the last  work submitted by participants. We look forward to sharing more statistics about the program, including countries and schools with the most student participants, in an upcoming blog post.

The mentors for each organization will spend the next couple of weeks selecting four Finalists (who will receive a hoodie too!) and their two Grand Prize Winners. Grand Prize Winners will be flown to Northern California to visit Google’s headquarters, enjoy a day of adventure in San Francisco, meet their mentors and hear talks from Google engineers.

Hearty congratulations to all the student participants for challenging themselves and making contributions to open source in the process!

Further, we’d like to thank the mentors and the organization administrators for GCI 2018. They are the heart of this program, volunteering countless hours creating tasks, reviewing student work, and helping bring students into the world of open source. Mentors teach young students about the many facets of open source development, from community standards and communicating across time zones to version control and testing. We couldn’t run this program without you! Thank you!

Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing the Grand Prize Winners and Finalists on January 7, 2019!

By Saranya Sampat, Google Open Source

Knative momentum continues, hits another adoption milestone

Released just four months ago by Google Cloud in collaboration with several vendors, Knative, an open source platform based on Kubernetes which provides the building blocks for serverless workloads, has already gained broad support.

The number of contributors has doubled, more than a dozen companies have contributed each month, and community contributions have increased over 45% since the 0.1 release. It’s an encouraging signal that validates the need for such a project, and suggests that ongoing development will be driven by healthy discussions among users and contributors.

Knative 0.2 Release 

In recent 0.2 release, the first major release since the project’s launch in July, we incorporated 323 pull requests from eight different companies. Knative 0.2 added a new Eventing resource model to complement the Serving and Build components. There were also lots of improvements under-the-hood, such as the implementation of pluggable routing and better support for autoscaling.

KubeCon North America

Continuing the theme, there are 10 sessions about Knative by speakers from seven different companies this week at KubeCon in Seattle. The sessions cover a variety of topics spanning from introductory overview sessions to advanced autoscaler customization. The number of companies represented by speakers illustrates the breadth of the growing Knative community.

Growing Ecosystem 

Another sign of Knative’s momentum is the growing ecosystem. A number of enterprise platform developers have begun using Knative to create serverless solutions on Kubernetes for their own hybrid cloud use-cases. Their use of the Knative API makes for a consistent developer experience and enables workload portability. For example, Pivotal, a top contributor to the Knative project, has adopted Knative alongside Kubernetes which helps them dedicate more resources higher in the stack:

"Since the release of Knative, we've been collaborating on an open functions platform to help companies run their new workloads on every cloud. That’s why we’re excited to launch the alpha of Pivotal Function Service." – Onsi Fakhouri, SVP of Engineering at Pivotal

Similarly, TriggerMesh has launched a hosted serverless management platform that runs on top of Knative, enabling developers to deploy and manage their functions from a central console.

"Knative provides us with the critical building blocks we need to create our serverless management platform." – Sebastien Goasguen, Co-founder, TriggerMesh

We’re excited by the speed with which Knative is being adopted and the broad cross section of the industry that is already contributing to the project. If you haven’t already jumped in, we invite you to get involved! Come visit github.com/knative and join the growing Knative community.

By Mark Chmarny, Knative Team