Summer of Coders at Google Krakow

By Martin Harvan, 2008 Student for the SIP Communicator project

I was thrilled when I found out there would be a Google Summer of Code meetup in Krakow, not far from where I live. I not only wanted to visit Google's offices and see behind the scenes of Google, I was excited to meet fellow Summer of Code students and some of Google's engineers. The office visit, which was held on August 4th, turned out to be just as fun as I anticipated.

After we arrived, our hosts showed us around the office and offered "java" and snacks. Following refreshments, a few of the employees informally introduced the projects they are working on and told us about life at Google. It was very interesting to see how many different projects are done in this single office.



Each of us 20+ students then got a short time to introduce what we were working on for our Summer of Code projects. Once again it was interesting to see the wide variety of projects. After we finished talking about our projects, we were given some cool Google swag and there was time for discussion, more food and some fun (table tennis, Wii tennis, RockBand etc.). Time went by very quickly and too soon it was time to go, so we took some pictures and said goodbye to our hosts.

Mozilla and Eclipse Licenses Now Available for Hosting Users

By Chris DiBona, Open Source Team

You might remember that we recently removed the MPL from the list of licenses available to projects hosted on Google Code. We did this because we have been trying as a company to make a statement against open source license proliferation. You see, we feel it is damaging to the larger world of open source development if there are too many duplicative licenses. So...Why are we changing our mind about the MPL and EPL now?

Since we started hosting projects, we've been petitioned by the Eclipse Foundation (of which Google is a member) and its community of developers to include the EPL as an option for new projects. We've resisted until now as we felt that the features of the EPL were not unique enough to justify its inclusion. This hasn't changed, but how we think about licenses is getting a bit more nuanced.

Eclipse is an important, lively and healthy project with an enormous plug in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative license. They aren't interested in using the BSD or other open source licenses that are readily combinable with EPL code. We have decided that after nearly 2 years of operation, that it was time to add the EPL and serve these open source developers.

We also want to show our solidarity with our friends at the Eclipse project through this action.

Considering the user base, and not just the popularity of an otherwise non-majority license isn't unprecedented for us. For instance: We considered this when we first opened the site in our acceptance of the Artistic/GPLv2 combination which sees little substantive use outside of Perl.

In that light, our removal of the MPL from the site seemed a little absurd. So, our bad. We're putting that option back up for new projects. The groups that want to use the MPL to enable their additions, extensions and more for Firefox and other Mozilla projects are legion and considering their recent summit, represent a very healthy global collection of developers.

Let us know what you think in the comments and we look forward to seeing the new projects that we'll be able to serve here on Google Code.

Uzaygezen: Multi-Dimensional Indexing with Hilbert Curves

By Daniel Aioanei, Dublin Engineering Team

I'm pleased to announce the initial release of the Open Source project Uzaygezen, a Java library specialised in multi-dimensional indexing based on Hilbert curves. For those who may be wondering about the origins of the project's name, a fellow engineer in Dublin suggested this word from his native Turkish, as Uzaygezen means "space wanderer." The library supports mapping from a multi-dimensional space into one dimension via the Compact Hilbert Index. Additionally, Uzaygezen allows query building for databases with range query functionality, e.g. relational databases and, more generally, B-trees. To find out more and to check out the code, please visit the project homepage.

We always love to hear what you think. Please join the Uzaygezen discussion group to share your thoughts with us.

Git and Google Summer of Code

By Shawn Pearce, Open Source Team and Git Developer

Many of you may remember our most recent episode of the Google Summer of Code™ podcast, Getting Giddy with Git. Now that we're heading into the program home stretch, we're back with an update on the success (and failures) of Summer of Code within the Git community.

This year Git was fortunate enough to get 6 very hard-working students, focusing on a number of different projects to make Git more portable and run even faster. Among our high-profile projects for 2008, Miklos Vajna's native C port of git-merge entered the main tree on July 8th, just one day after the mid-term evaluation period began. Miklos' work shipped as a key part of Git 1.6.0, released on August 17th. We were also excited to see Marek Zawirski's push implementation for EGit (the Eclipse plugin) enter the main EGit tree on June 28th, weeks before the program mid-term. Difficulties working with SWT caused Marek's GUI implementation to be delayed, but it finally showed up at the last minute as a 31 patch series. We are looking forward to seeing this in the fall EGit release.

To read even more about all of our great student projects, see the mailing list thread Jakub Narebski started during the 'pencils down' period. Jakub offers an excellent summary of every student project, and many of the students provide more detailed updates later in the thread.

Sojourning in Szeged? Stop by DrupalCon 2008

By Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Open Source Team

If you're passionate about web development and will be in or around Szeged, Hungary next week, be sure to stop by DrupalCon 2008. Nearly 500 developers will be descending on the city to discuss all things Drupal, from improving user experience to further growing this CMS' vibrant community. Our very own Leslie Hawthorn, geek herder extraordinaire, will be presenting on Open Source at Google, with highlights from Drupal's participation in the Google Summer of Code™ program and the Google Highly Open Participation Contest™.

If you can make it, be sure to swing by to say hello to Leslie!