Much like the Summer of Love in the 60’s, the Sumer of Code offered by Google has come to a conclusion. And judging from what I am reading below in the attached article, it looks like it was quite a summer at that!

Google’s Summer of Code (SOC), a program that matched computer science students with free and open source software (FOSS) projects and paid for results, is over. Despite some organizational problems, the SOC attracted an overwhelming response from both students and projects, and early indications are that the program has produced a wide range of projects and attracted a number of promising students to the FOSS communities. Whether the program will be repeated, however, remains undetermined.

Chris DiBona, open source program manager at Google, said that the idea for the SOC came directly from Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. According to DiBona, the idea was to have students “exposed to real developers and the open source development community. We also wanted the open source community to be infused with the excitement, fun and innovation that new people can bring.”

The name for the program came from the Summer of Love, a name given to the summer of 1967 in San Francisco, which is widely perceived as the apex of Sixties counterculture. In addition, DiBona said, “We wanted to have the word ‘code’ in the title as a sidelong glance to Google’s Code Web site,” a site maintained by Google for external developers interested in the company’s use of open source software. [Read the rest]