Google has started it’s annual Google Summer of Code program where hundreds of university students are paid to make open source contributions. Each successful submission is honored with $4500 to student’s bank account (local taxes apply) and $500 to Eclipse Foundation.

Eclipse is one of the participating open source organizations and previous years have been shown amazing impact on the Eclipse ecosystem in general. Several students are now active community members and continuing their path in Eclipse world.

Google SoC 2006 had it’s little impact also on the open source and free Eclipse plugin Mylar which got 2 SoC slots. Mylar success has been breathtaking and within one year this newcomer has positioned itself in top of the eclipse open source plugin arena. Mylar beauty is that it can be used for very simple things like browsing your issues/issuefilters in Trac,Bugzilla,Jira,XPlanner etc. At the same time Mylar concept is much more complex trying to have invisible context trackers to highlight only important bits within given task/context.

Now back to the point!

It has not yet been decided how many $500+$4500 slots are allocated to Eclipse this year but last year Eclipse got 11 slots (11x$5000).

To make the Google SoC a success Eclipse needs very strong proposals and students, so… Hurry up and think about it!

From my own experience one should seriously consider if he is able to spend most of the summer for hacking with the code : ) I did but still regret a bit all the sunshine I missed in this usually dirty Estonian weather..

The project proposal deadline is in 6 days – March 26th!

Links to get you started:

• http://code.google.com/soc Official Google Summer of Code 2007 homepage
• http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Google_Summer_of_Code_2007_Ideas Eclipse project proposal ideas
• + always warm and welcoming #eclipse channel at freenode IRC