Google's Summer of Code institution was born in 2005 with the intent of bringing bright but relatively inexperienced programmers together with seasoned mentors to collaborate on real world open source projects. Accepted applicants are given a stipend, a chance to develop valuable relationships, priceless experience, and a nice bullet point on their CV - not to mention some killer portfolio material.
1,000 students from 70 countries are participating this year - coding for a diverse collection of applications, including Audacity and Battle for Wesnoth. Drupal, OpenOffice, Pearl, The MacPorts Project and Wine are a few other names represented on the list of accepted organizations.
Some participants of years past worked with GNOME, Eclipse, and KDE. Admission to SoC is no small achievement. Google continues its history of cultivating the world's best programmers, and the innovators of tomorrow's software. Congratulations to those clever folks that made it in. Let the coding begin!
One more thing I'd like top mention as a footnote. Since none of this year's accepted students are from Thailand, I was surprized to find Thai documentation when I went searching through Google's official SoC logo folder for a thumbnail to associate with this post. I'm really not sure what that's about, but felt the need to point it out.
