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The FreeBSD Project is pleased to participate as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code 2008. This program funds students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break. We have had over 70 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program in 2005, 2006, 2007. and 2008.

Benefit of Participating

Google Summer of Code is an exciting opportunity for students to "intern" with an open source project for a summer. The FreeBSD Project, as one of the most successful and oldest open source projects, is an excellent place to do this internship. Founded in 1993, the project now consists of several hundred "committers" and tens of thousands of contributors. FreeBSD is the foundation for many commercial products, including Apple's Mac OS X, NetApp's OnTap/GX, Juniper's JunOS, as well countless other products, and is widely used in the Internet Service Provider and corporate IT worlds. Many of these sponsors participate daily in the FreeBSD community, and students have the opportunity to develop software ideas in an exciting environment with many real world applications, and under the mentorship of experienced developers.

After the summer ends, many of our students are sponsored by Google or the FreeBSD Foundation to attend operating systems and open source conferences to present on their work, and a significant number go on to become FreeBSD developers. It's also a great job networking opportunity!

Current Student Projects

We've recently announced the successful students from the Summer of Code 2008.

Past Student Projects

For a complete list of student projects from previous years, visit:

See also our wiki pages for student projects [2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005].

Example Proposal Ideas

The application period for this year has closed, but students and interested developers can always find interesting work that needs to be done on the FreeBSD Project Ideas list.

For additional ideas about upcoming development projects in FreeBSD, take a look at recent Developer Status Reports.

Mentors

A number of FreeBSD committers are willing to mentor students. A good place to start is the 'Technical contacts' listed with the example projects on the Ideas page.

Infrastructure Provided to Students

In previous years, the FreeBSD Project provided access to the FreeBSD Perforce revision control infrastructure in order to facilitate student collaboration, provide public access and archiving for the on-going student projects, and to help mentors and the community monitor on-going work. It is expected that students participating in future programs will be offered the same facilities. Students will also be asked to maintain wiki pages on their on-going projects. In the past, e-mail, IRC, and instant messaging have proven popular among students and mentors, and students participating in the FreeBSD summer program are encouraged to use these and other electronic communication mechanisms to become active in the community.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • I wasn't selected for funding by Google as part of the Google Summer of Code, can I still participate?

    Yes! By all means. Each year we have many more talented student applications that there are available places and we are very happy when students choose to get involved with FreeBSD. Please mail soc-mentors@FreeBSD.org about how to proceed with your project.

  • What projects were completed successfully by students last summer?

    Please see the 2008 FreeBSD Summer of Code page, as well as older project pages from 2007, 2006, and 2005 for a list of the completed projects from previous years.