Google Open Source Blog

A Change to Google Code Download Service

2013-05-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Each project comes with its own member controls, Subversion/Mercurial/Git repository, issue tracker, wiki pages, and downloads service.

Downloads were implemented by Project Hosting on Google Code to enable open source projects to make their files available for public download. Unfortunately, downloads have become a source of abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently. Due to this increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure, we are deprecating downloads.

Starting today, existing projects that do not have any downloads and all new projects will not have the ability to create downloads. Existing projects with downloads will see no visible changes until January 14, 2014 and will no longer have the ability to create new downloads starting on January 15, 2014. All existing downloads in these projects will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future.

If your project is using downloads to host and distribute files and has a need to periodically create new downloads, we recommend you move your downloads to an alternate service like Google Drive before January 15, 2014. If you choose to move your files to Google Drive, check out our help article.

By Google Project Hosting

Google Summer of Code meetups, Episode 8: Lahore, Pakistan

2013-05-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Google Developer Group (GDG) Lahore hosted their fourth event on the afternoon of April 18th with support from Plan9 (Tech Incubator) and P@SHA. The event had a variety of attendees, from early Computer Science students to soon-to-be graduates, to industry professionals and faculty members from various universities in Lahore, Pakistan.

As part of the event agenda, GDG Lahore hosted a panel about Google Summer of Code where Muhammad Adnan shared his experiences from Google Summer of Code as a both a student and a mentor. Muhammad was a Google Summer of Code student in the 2010 program for phpMyAdmin and a Mentor for RTEMS in Google Summer of Code 2012 and Mentor for Google Code-in 2011 and 2012.

Adnan shared his story about how he first discovered the program through Twitter and ultimately applied for the Google Summer of Code program. He motivated students who were interested in applying for Google Summer of Code and gave them tips on writing their applications. Adnan explained how Google is providing opportunities for student developers to show their skills and how to increase the chances of their proposal being accepted by the mentoring organizations involved in this year’s Google Summer of Code. The session ended with questions from attendees about Google Summer of Code and its many benefits.

Historically, Google Summer of Code hasn’t had very many entries from Pakistan, possibly because many students are not familiar with Google Summer of Code here. The main purpose of this session was to let students know more about the program and encouraging students to apply. GDG Lahore plans to brings a similar session Google Summer of Code in many other universities in Lahore in the coming months.

By Haris Nadeem , GDG Lahore Manager

Go 1.1 is released

2013-05-13T15:17:00.001-07:00

Since the release of Go 1.0 in March last year, the "gophers"—a team at Google and hundreds of contributors from the open source community—have been hard at work.

Today we released Go 1.1, a release that includes significant performance improvements, a race detector for finding concurrency bugs, new standard library functionality, and other fixes and refinements.

Go continues to be a thriving open source project. Since Go 1.0, the core received more than 2600 commits from 161 people outside Google.

Check out the announcement blog post for more details.

By Andrew Gerrand, Go Team

Student Proposal deadline for Google Summer of Code hours away

2013-05-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

We’re in the final hours for students interested in this year’s Google Summer of Code to submit their project proposals to mentoring organizations. Students, be sure to submit your proposal to the program site by this Friday, May 3rd at 19:00 UTC (Noon PDT) to be considered for this year’s program.

We receive a lot of great applications and your proposal is what will make you stand out from the rest of the applicants. For tips on writing a quality proposal that will grab the attention of the mentoring organizations check out the student manual written by students, for students.

For more general tips on successful student participation, read the helpful dos and don’ts written by a group of experienced Google Summer of Code administrators, our new user’s guide for the program site, Frequently Asked Questions and timeline. You can also stay up-to-date on all things Google Summer of Code on our Google Open Source blog, mailing lists or on IRC at #gsoc on Freenode.

Don’t miss out on an exciting summer full of open source coding by waiting until the last minute and missing the deadline. All proposals must be submitted before Friday, May 3rd at 19:00 UTC.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs

Got CFF?

2013-05-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

A dramatically improved CFF rasterizer for FreeType

In our commitment to the open source community, Google, in cooperation with Adobe and the FreeType project, released the Adobe CFF engine, an advanced CFF rasterizer, into open source for beta test. This paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences. The FreeType open source software powers font display on more than a billion devices. It is used for rendering on a variety of platforms including Android, Chrome OS, Linux, iOS, and many versions of Unix.

OpenType, an extension of TrueType, can describe glyph outlines in two ways — TrueType outline format and Compact Font Format (CFF). CFF is a descendant of the PostScript font format developed by Adobe. These formats use different approaches to specifying the glyphs (the images for each character) and the hints (the instructions on how to modify a glyph to look good at certain sizes). CFF fonts are capable of very high quality display but the technology places the burden for this display quality on the text rasterizer instead of on the font as is done in TrueType. The new Adobe CFF engine brings that high quality rasterizer support to FreeType.

Because many display devices have finite resolution limits, displaying text requires balancing many things: making the text readable, ensuring that no characters are too light or too heavy, consistent height and width, all while respecting the original typeface design. The tradeoffs required to make the text look good are more difficult to balance as the size of the text decreases. For languages like Japanese, where there are often many strokes per character, it is even more difficult and great care must be taken to avoid the character turning into an unreadable blob.

Text rasterization produced by the new Adobe CFF engine in FreeType is dramatically more faithful to the typeface design. The improvements include better stem widths and placement, fewer dropouts, dramatic reduction in the ‘blobbiness’ of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and more even visual weight. While all of this may sound somewhat technical, the advantages are not, and will benefit technical and non-technical users alike. These improvements lead to more beautiful looking text that is easier to read.

FreeType Native CFF Rasterizer

FreeType Light Auto Hint Rasterizer

FreeType using the New Adobe CFF Rasterizer

In these examples you can clearly see an improvement in the overall “beauty” of the text when the new Adobe CFF rasterizer is used. The original FreeType CFF rasterizer is used in the first sample and it has very inconsistent blackness with a lot of blobbiness. The sample generated using the original FreeType rasterizer with auto hinting is in the middle and it is better but it lightens the original font too much and makes it faint, plus the individual glyphs have a lot of variation in height. Finally, the last sample generated using the new advanced rasterizer is on the bottom and it produces more even blackness of text, fewer blobs, more even and consistent character heights, and fewer dropouts.

FreeType Native CFF Rasterizer

FreeType Light Auto Hint Rasterizer

FreeType using the New Adobe CFF Rasterizer

The improvement for Latin text is just as striking. The example above shows the quality improvement - still with the original FreeType on top, FreeType with auto hinting in the middle, and the new advanced CFF rasterizer in FreeType on the bottom.

The new Adobe CFF rasterizer is available to test as part of the FreeType release. Those who build applications and platforms using FreeType are encouraged during this beta period to test it out. The rest of you are unfortunately going to have to wait until after the beta test is done and the various platforms using FreeType have fully integrated the changes. We promise it will be worth the wait.

By Stuart Gill and Brian Stell, Internationalization Engineering

Google Summer of Code meetups, Episode 7: Cluj-Napoca, Romania

2013-04-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

On March 23rd a Google Summer of Code meetup was held in Romania as part of the GDG Cluj-Napoca meeting with almost 50 students in attendance. The event featured a couple of experienced open source developers, Stas Suşcov and Attila-Mihály Balázs, who were interested in inspiring university students to participate in open source development. Stas is a former Google Summer of Code student and Attila-Mihály is an open source enthusiast. They discuss their experiences in open source and some of the benefits of participating in the Google Summer of Code program below.

I participated twice as a student in Google Summer of Code, in 2010 and 2011, for the WordPress Foundation. For my first summer project I worked on a social learning platform called Courseware for BuddyPress social network. Two years later, together with my friend David, we launched our own startup based on my Google Summer of Code experience, The Courseware Project. Before becoming a student in the program, I had already been involved in a lot of local and global open source communities (Ubuntu, Mozilla, WordPress) and being part of Google Summer of Code was a natural outcome which greatly improved my professional abilities and relationships with people involved in these projects.

During the meetup I tried to share my experiences and answer as many questions as possible about being a Google Summer of Code student and give helpful tips on how actions to take so the organization will want you for another year as a participant or mentor once you finish your current project.

By Stas Sușcov - former Google Summer of Code student and Developer/Operations at Coursewa.re

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As a user and creator of open source technology I’m a big believer in its benefits. That’s why when I saw this year’s Google Summer of Code announcement I thought: I need to promote it to as many students as possible. My presentation was a very quick introduction to the concept of open source, the possible reasons for contributing and what steps somebody should take when starting to work on an open source project. The slides used in the presentation are available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

In my opinion the main benefits for students who contribute to an open source project through the Google Summer of Code program are:

learning how to use tools like IDEs, VCSs, issue/bug trackers, build systems, etc. - these are integral parts of a programmer’s daily life but rarely mentioned in studies at universities

learning how to work with an existing project and its infrastructure - most of the projects people end up working on already exist, but in university most of the projects students are taught about are described as being created from-scratch

learning how to communicate with others, especially remotely - as much as 80% of a programmer's job is communication and working on an open source project is a great way to practice this

having something tangible to show on one’s resume

and finally the monetary benefits are also nice

By Attila-Mihály Balázs, developer at Udacity

I would like to thank again the organizers (GDG Cluj-Napoca) and my co-presenter, Stas. My goal is to make Romania the number one contributing country to Google Summer of Code.

By Attila-Mihály Balázs, developer at Udacity and open source enthusiast

Google Summer of Code meetups, Episode 6: Cairo, Egypt

2013-04-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

With a lot of passion and enthusiasm, around 80 Computer Engineering students attended a meetup hosted by GDG Cairo at Faculty of Engineering of Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt on Saturday, April 13th. Students were from all levels of schooling with a majority being 1st and 4th year students.

Under the guidance of PhD Bassem Amin, from the Computer Engineering department, GDG Cairo hosted a panel of Google Summer of Code alumni to give an introduction about the Google Summer of Code 2013 program to prospective students.

The meetup started with a presentation by Mostafa Muhammad, a 2008 and 2009 Google Summer of Code alumnus who worked with the Joomla! organization. He gave an introductory speech about the Google Summer of Code program and the 2013 program timeline. He emphasized that participating organizations understand that applicants are students with moderate skills and that they are still learning, which is why a mentor is paired with each student to help with questions they have when working on their project. Mostafa stressed the importance of the students’ written project proposal and their general fit with the project when organizations are choosing their students.

Cat Allman, from the Google Open Source Programs Office, joined the live Hangout giving a very interesting talk about the program, exciting the students who then asked her questions about the background needed for the program.

Next, Mohamed Tarek, a former Computer Engineering student and Google Summer of Code 2009 and 2010 alumnus, explained in more detail the steps for applying to the program using the Google Summer of Code 2013 website. He gave a demo on choosing an organization and reviewing their ideas list, how to use the mailing lists, using the IRC channel for questions, and where to look for other contact information provided by each organization.

The microphone was then passed to our youngest speakers, Google Summer of Code 2012 alumni, Islam Wazery and Ahmed Refaat, both Shrouk Academy Computer Science graduates. Islam discussed how to write a quality proposal and gave a demo on his own accepted proposal to KDE from 2012, complete with a slideshow.

Islam Wazeery talking about writing a proposal

Seif Lotfy, a Google Summer of Code mentor for the past five years with KDE and GNOME, gave a final talk on how to increase the chances of your proposal being accepted by the mentoring organizations from the perspective of a mentor reading through the proposals.

We concluded the meetup with our speakers hosting a Q&A panel and answering some more detailed and specialized questions asked by enthusiastic students.

From left to right: Ahmed Refaat, Islam Wazery, Mohamed Tarek and Mostafa Muhammad during Q&A panel

We would like to thank all of the attendees and everyone who contributed to making this meetup a success.

By Mohamed Abdellatif, GDG Cairo Organizer

A new kind of summer job: open source coding with Google Summer of Code

2013-04-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

(cross-posted from the Official Google blog)

If you’re a university student with CS chops looking to earn real-world experience this summer, consider writing code for a cool open source project with the Google Summer of Code program.

Over the past eight years more than 6,000 students have “graduated” from this global program, working with almost 400 different open source projects. Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned in university to good use by working on an actual software project over the summer. Students are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer they strengthen their future employment opportunities in fields related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Interested students can submit proposals on the website starting now through Friday, May 3 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 177 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. Because Google Summer of Code has a limited number of spots for students, writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program. Be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice.

For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source blog, join our Summer of Code mailing lists or join us on Internet relay chat at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until May 3 to apply!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source team

Google Summer of Code Veteran Mentors

2013-04-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

As we near the start of the student application period on April 22nd for Google Summer of Code 2013, we wanted to give a shout out to the other superstars (besides the students) essential to the success of the program, the mentors and organization administrators (org admins). We recently sent a survey to the Google Summer of Code Mentors group list and discovered that the program has come full circle for many of the mentors who once started out as students and had so much fun that they felt the desire to mentor new students themselves.

Of the 132 mentors that filled out the survey, 23 have been a part of the program for four or more years out of the last eight years of the Google Summer of Code program. Below is a list of the mentors and organization administrators* with the organizations they worked with and the years in each role. In many cases they both acted as an organization administrator and a mentor during the summer program.

Thank you for all of your dedication and the guidance you provide the students!

Name	Organization	Years Participated as a Student	Years Participated as a Mentor	Years Participated as an Org Administrator
Luca Barbato	Gentoo, Libav and Audacious	----	2006-2012	2007
Reimar Bauer	MoinMoin Wiki	----	2007-2012	2010-2012
Olly Betts	SWIG and Xapian Search Engine Library	----	2008, 2009, 2011, 2012	2009, 2011, 2012
Bastian Blank	MoinMoin and Debian	2008	2009-2012	2011
Marc Delisle	PhpMyAdmin	----	2008-2012	2010-2012
Philipp Kewisch	Mozilla	----	2009-2012	----
Luis Gustavo Lira	E-cidadania	----	2008-2012	----
Hin-Tak Leung	The Linux Foundation	----	2008, 2010-2012	----
Scott McCreary	Haiku	----	2009-2012	----
Aaron Meurer	SymPy	2009, 2010	2011, 2012	2011, 2012
Tom Musgrove	Blender Foundation	----	2010-2012	2008-2012
Erik Ogenvik	Worldforge	----	2008-2012	2009-2012
Josef Perktold	Python Software Foundation	----	2009-2012	----
Lydia Pintscher	KDE	----	2008	2007-2012
Alberto Ruiz	GNOME	----	2009-2012	----
Kevin Smith	XSF	2006	2007-2009, 2011-2012	2009, 2011, 2012
Harlan Stenn	NTP Project, FreeBSD, Google OSPO, GNU	----	2008-2012	2009-2012
Ian Taylor	GCC	----	2006, 2007, 2010, 2011	2006-2010
David Trowbridge	Review Board	----	2007, 2009-2012	2009-2012
Frances Tyers	Apertium	----	2009-2012	2009-2012
Thomas Waldmann	MoinMoin Wiki	----	2006-2009, 2011, 2012	2006-2012
Frank Warmerdam	OSGeo	----	2006-2010, 2012	2006
Marina Zhurakhinskaya	GNOME	----	2009-2011	2012

Organizations are currently busy talking with prospective students about their ideas for projects over the summer. For more information about the Google Summer of Code, visit the program site and check out this year’s important dates.

*This is not a comprehensive list of all mentors and organization administrators who have participated 4 or more times in the program, only a list of those who filled out our survey.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Xen Hackathon 2013 at the Google Dublin office

2013-04-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that the Ganeti team at Google is hosting the Xen Hackathon 2013 on May 16-17 at the Google offices in Dublin, Ireland.

The aim of the Hackathon is to give developers the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss development, write code and collaborate with other developers as well as allowing everyone to put names with faces. Given that the Ganeti team will host the event, there will be more of a focus on management stacks and cloud integration. This year the organizers are planning more structure at the Hackathons and will cover Xen on ARM, Xen 4.4 planning as well as any topics that attendees may want to discuss.

Pre-registration, which includes a $15 contribution to Threshold (an Irish charity that works to prevent homelessness) is required for attendance. Space is limited for the event and usually fills up very quickly. To register for the Xen Hackathon, visit the event page and request an invitation. You will be notified by email within 10 days as to whether your request has been accepted and then you will need to confirm or reject your invitation. Once you confirm your invitation by filling out your registration details you will be officially registered.

We hope to see you in May!

By Guido Trotter, Ganeti team

Google Summer of Code Meetup Episode 5: Graz, Austria

2013-04-15T11:25:00.001-07:00

In the last eight weeks, over 18 Google Summer of Code meetups have been organized by students, mentors and open source enthusiasts in locales as diverse as Turkey, Sri Lanka, France, Italy, Macedonia, Canada, and Austria. A handful of meetups will be held in the next couple of weeks all leading up to to the start of the student application period for Google Summer of Code on April 22nd. Below is a summary of a recent meetup in Austria held by members of the Catroid Project.

The Catroid Project has been lucky to be a part of Google Summer of Code for the past two years (we were just chosen for a third year). During that time we have noticed that European students are less likely to apply for the Google Summer of Code program, or at least for our project. We believe that there is a lack of information about Google Summer of Code and Free and open source software (FOSS) in general here in Europe and we feel there is great potential for FOSS projects to acquire more contributors if students only knew about initiatives like Google Summer of Code. Our goal with these meetups is to inform university students about Google Summer of Code and to spark interest in FOSS.

We held a Google Summer of Code information session at the University of Technology in Graz, Austria on the 13th of March 2013 where there were over 50 students from various information technology fields. We held a second session at the Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey on the 11th of April with 10 students in attendance.

Meetup at University of Technology in Graz, Austria

Our information sessions are designed as a general introduction into Google Summer of Code including what the program is, who can participate, a short overview of projects that participated in previous years, how to apply, and who should apply. Next Sercan Akpolat did a presentation on the Catroid Project and Peter Grasch presented on KDE. They discussed their projects, the mentoring process and the way they go about choosing students from their many applications. We then ended with a question and answer (Q&A) session.

We had very positive feedback and realized that none of the students had ever heard of Google Summer of Code before walking into the room. During the Q&A, the students expressed their concerns about the workload necessary for Google Summer of Code. Most questions regarded the expertise and working hours required for successful participation in the program.

Based on his experience in previous Google Summer of Code years, Sercan explained that the typical workload is challenging but achievable. Regarding the expertise level required for the program, Sercan and Peter explained that intermediate knowledge is sufficient. The Google Summer of Code is designed to inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development, to learn and to broaden their minds.

By Annemarie Harzl and Sercan Akpolat, The Catroid Project

You can visit the Google Summer of Code website for more information on the 177 mentoring organizations that students will be working with this summer.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

FOSS talk at Google Zurich office

2013-04-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

March 8 celebrated Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Day in the Google Zurich office. Google employees gathered to listen to talks by Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source at Google, and Karsten Gerloff, president of Free Software Foundation Europe. The evening wrapped up with a FOSS game where the new hires proved they were better at answering tricky questions than old-timers.

Open Source at Google
As Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Google, Chris DiBona leads exciting initiatives like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in that encourage university and pre-university students, respectively, to participate in open source software development. Chris also spearheads other initiatives to encourage Googlers to contribute to FOSS projects - for example, he advises Google employees on how to open source their code and how to bring open source code into Google. Most importantly, Chris mentioned that the major FOSS licenses are in fact not difficult to comply with.

Chris’ talk is part of the internal training for new-hires at Google and focuses on various internal procedures and guidelines for how to deal with open source, licenses, and patents.

Free Software Foundation Europe
As president of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Karsten Gerloff promotes Free and Open Source Software, educates politicians, regulators and businesses on the benefits of FOSS.

In his talk “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, Karsten explored the tremendous benefits a networked world is to society, information sharing, and personal freedom. Only within Karsten’s lifetime, we’ve gone from very expensive long distance phone calls, to virtually no-cost communication anywhere and anytime. He pointed out that the various technologies which make this possible came to be because they built on simple open standards. Thus, the Internet was based on mostly general purpose computers, the word-wide-web was realised on top of neutral networks and TCP/IP, and Wikipedia on top of WWW, and so on.

Karsten highlighted how Free Software Foundation works to promote an alternative to the locked-down centralised world through the use of free and general purpose and distributed systems and FOSS. Some examples includes the FreedomBox, GNU/Linux and other free operating systems, Diaspora, Bitcoin, YaCy, and GNUnet. Furthermore, FSFE will support developers, shaping the laws guarding against patent trolls. See fsfe.org/fellowship for information on how to give your support.

How much do you know about open source?
For the last part of the evening, a hand-full of FOSS contributors in the Zurich office demonstrated their work. This was based on both contributions related to Google projects, and projects people dedicate their free time to outside of work.

There was also a contingent of “Nooglers” (new Googlers), who had to answer rather tricky questions about FOSS. The game was set up so Nooglers and old-time Googlers were competing, and the new-hires won the game, remembering which printer it was Richard Stallman struggled with in 1980 (Xerox 9700), and that even though Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his native tongue is Swedish.

The evening was an eye opener for many in the audience who weren’t familiar with open source and with the inspiring talks from both Chris and Karsten, hopefully even more Googlers will release open source code and work on open source projects in the future.

By Havard Rast Blok-Monsivais, Software Engineer in Test

Mentoring Organizations for Google Summer of Code 2013 Announced

2013-04-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

We are excited to announce the mentoring organizations that have been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code program. It was tough, but after reviewing 417 applications, we have chosen 177 open source projects, of which 40 are new to Google Summer of Code. You can visit our Google Summer of Code 2013 program website for a complete list of the accepted projects.

Over the next 14 days students interested in applying for the Google Summer of Code 2013 program can learn more about the 177 accepted open source projects before the student application period begins on Monday, April 22, 2013 at 19:00 UTC.

Each organization has compiled an Ideas Page that students will want to review carefully and consider how they might be able to contribute to the project. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project on the Ideas Page that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest a new idea to the organization.There are points of contact listed for each organization on their Ideas Page so that students can contact the organization directly to discuss a new proposal. All organizations list their preferred method of communication on the organization homepage, available on the Google Summer of Code program website. Please see our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.

Congratulations to all of our future mentoring organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during this exciting 9th year of Google Summer of Code!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

2013-04-03T14:05:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog

WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.

However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.

In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.

Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we’ve set strong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.

To learn more about Blink visit our project page.

By Adam Barth, Software Engineer

Google Summer of Code Meetups, Episode 4: CUNY Hunter College, New York City, USA

2013-04-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, 13 March 2013, Sumana Harihareswara of The Wikimedia Foundation, Daniel Packer (2011 alumnus), and Robert O’Connor (three time alumnus and mentor for the past 2 years) ran an information session at CUNY Hunter College to provide prospective students with information about the Google Summer of Code program.

Students received a fun and informative presentation on Google Summer of Code basics including mentoring organizations, application and program timeline, project structure, and all the awesome benefits of Google Summer of Code. We fielded questions from the 30 students in attendance, all of whom showed strong interest in the program. The interests of those in attendance was broad and ranged from bioinformatics to computer vision and just about anything and everything in between.

A trail of links was followed from the Google Summer of Code site to the mentoring organization site, and then to mentors themselves, with a discussion on how to approach particular mentors and projects. Students also enjoyed sending a greeting to the #gsoc IRC channel and receiving replies and cheers from others in the channel. All in all it was a fantastic meeting which promised to result in some excited Google Summer of Code applicants.

By Robert O’Connor and Daniel Packer

Stay tuned for another Google Summer of Code meetup post next week. Currently the Google Open Source Programs Office is busy reviewing hundreds of mentoring organization applications and deciding which organizations will be accepted into this year’s program. Participating organizations will be announced on the program site on April 8th.

Taking a stand on open source and patents

2013-03-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

At Google we believe that open systems win. Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally. And while open platforms have faced growing patent attacks, requiring companies to defensively acquire ever more patents, we remain committed to an open Internet—one that protects real innovation and continues to deliver great products and services.

Today, we’re taking another step towards that goal by announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge: we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.

We’ve begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used. Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.

We hope the OPN Pledge will serve as a model for the industry, and we’re encouraging other patent holders to adopt the pledge or a similar initiative. We believe it has a number of advantages:

Transparency. Patent holders determine exactly which patents and related technologies they wish to pledge, offering developers and the public transparency around patent rights.
Breadth. Protections under the OPN Pledge are not confined to a specific project or open- source copyright license. (Google contributes a lot of code under such licenses, like the Apache or GNU GPL licenses, but their patent protections are limited.) The OPN Pledge, by contrast, applies to any open-source software—past, present or future—that might rely on the pledged patents.
Defensive protection. The Pledge may be terminated, but only if a party brings a patent suit against Google products or services, or is directly profiting from such litigation.
Durability. The Pledge remains in force for the life of the patents, even if we transfer them.

Our pledge builds on past efforts by companies like IBM and Red Hat and the work of the Open Invention Network (of which Google is a member). It also complements our efforts on cooperative licensing, where we’re working with like-minded companies to develop patent agreements that would cut down on lawsuits.

And, in addition to these industry-driven initiatives, we continue to support patent reforms that would improve patent quality and reduce excessive litigation.

We hope the OPN Pledge will provide a model for companies looking to put their own patents into the service of open-source software, which continues to enable amazing innovation.

By Duane Valz, Senior Patent Counsel

Google Summer of Code Meetups, Episode 3: MIET, Meerut, India

2013-03-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

We held an information session on Google Summer of Code at Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology (MIET), in Meerut, India on 18th March 2013. The event was organized by Computer Association (Compass), a joint society of the Computer Science and Information Technology Department at MIET. This is the first event ever held about Google Summer of Code in Meerut. We had an overwhelming response with well over 250 enthusiasts for the session including quite a few faculty members.

2012 Google Summer of Code alumni, Naman Gupta, took the stage and gave a brief introduction on the Google Summer of Code program. The session started with some open source fundamentals and Naman talking about a couple of open source organizations including Crystal Space and KDE that had participated in the program in previous years. He discussed some of the benefits of the Google Summer of Code, giving examples of a few previous students and encouraging students who were afraid of coding but were still interested in the program. Next Naman described version control and gave tips on how to write good code. Naman reinforced that anyone could apply for Google Summer of Code as there are mentoring organizations from a wide range of fields. Naman highlighted the important dates and URL links for the program, some statistics, how to apply, and tips on writing project proposals for the Google Summer of Code.

In the Q&A session most of the students were worried about the difficulty level of the work. Naman responded to this question by telling the students that the work would be difficult but there would be mentors to help them out along the way. He also mentioned some of the challenges that he had faced and how he tackled them during last year’s program.  At the end of the session we gave away Google open source items making students very happy. The event was a great success and we hope to see more students from Meerut in the Google Summer of Code program.

By Udit Saini, Compass Board member

Stay tuned for our next Google Summer of Code meetup post next week. Open source organizations are applying to be mentoring organizations for this year’s program now through Friday, March 29th. Participating organizations will be announced on the program site on April 8th.

Wrapping up our summer, times 4

2013-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

We are currently in the beginning stages of the Google Summer of Code 2013 program so to inspire you students out there we have a selection of short wrapup posts by four of our mentoring organizations discussing students’ highlights from the 2012 program.

Hedgewars

I am at a loss for words for what our Google Summer of Code students accomplished last summer with Hedgewars, a turn based strategy, artillery, action and comedy game. We started the summer off with a bang when we decided on five brilliant projects. We had a really hard time picking the best projects from some very good ideas that were submitted. We had some doubts about timing and the deliverability but we accepted the risk and provided safe snorkeling masks and air tubes before the students dove into the code.

Four projects were successfully completed and it's showcase time:
◦ Android netplay by Simeon Maxein
Lots of GUI and API design involved with code portability issues and many days of protocol analysis, this will help unify our configuration handling across our many platforms.
◦ A new campaign by Szabolcs Orbàn
An essential feature to have, coding skills as well as storyline write down, maybe it's the last milestone before 1.0.
◦ Video Output Tool by Stepan Podoskin
Replay showcasting, with a neat YouTube uploader. A lot of new dependencies were added and it will be interesting to see how the community uses this.
◦ WebGL port by Meng Xiangyun
The Pandora's Box of coding, with an eye-candy demo. There is still a long way to go before this task is done but the premise looks really exciting.

Any amount of words would not do enough justice to the passion and dedication brought by all people involved, students and mentors, for Google Summer of Code and Hedgewars. I am really glad that we were allowed to join such an exciting program and that we were able to meet amazing people in the course. Yay for open source, games and everything in between!

By Vittorio Giovara, Hedgewars Organization Administrator

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GNSS-SDR

GNSS-SDR is an open source Global Navigation Satellite Systems software defined receiver. Luis Esteve worked on the development of acquisition and tracking modules for Galileo satellites' signals. At the time the Google Summer of Code 2012 started, GNSS-SDR was a GPS-only software receiver. By the end of the summer, it was able to acquire and track real-life signals from the first two Galileo space vehicles already in orbit, and it is prepared for the whole constellation of 30 satellites expected by the end of this decade. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on a positive acquisition of a true Galileo signal by an open source software receiver. The resulting developments will help researchers around the world in the rapid prototyping of new hybrid GPS/Galileo receivers able to provide user's position with unforeseen levels of accuracy, reliability and coverage, taking full advantage of the just born European global navigation satellite system.

By Carles Fernández-Prades, Google Summer of Code GNSS-SDR Organization Administrator

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OpenICC

Participation of the OpenICC group in the Google Summer of Code 2012 program was a great success this year. All three projects reached their respective goals, below is a small summary:
◦ Colour Management for Krita Printing
Joseph Simon worked on adaptation and integration of his previous year’s implementation for colour managed printing into Krita/Linux. The workflow is based on ICC profile injection into PDF through the means of an OutputIntent.
◦ KWin Colour Correction
Casian Andrei’s KWin changes for ICC style colour correction in the GPU are reviewed upstream and his new code to the KolorManager code base is awaiting approval. The concept follows the X Color Management spec. In contrast to the elder CompICC implementation the KWin result is highly modular and thus very flexible.
◦ Simple Toolkit Abstraction
Nitin Chadas’ SimpleUI project for rendering a subset of XForms was written from the ground up and provides new backends for FLTK, Gtk and Qt.
Thanks to Google for providing the colour management and graphics community again a great chance to code and learn the open source way.

By Kai-Uwe Behrmann, OpenICC Organization Administrator

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biographer

biographer is a web-based visualization tool for biological networks that helps depict and analyze metabolic, signaling and regulatory networks in cells which is mandatory for the understanding of complex diseases including cancer. Our team was very excited to participate in the Google Summer of Code once again.

We chose three bright students from twenty excellent applicants. Our students came onboard with most of the necessary skills for their tasks which was very exciting. It turned out that they were also among the most active students in our forum during the application phase.

◦ A data storage and conversion layer was implemented by Duan Lian which enables us to connect to the graph notation language SBGN-ML. This interoperability is important in order to establish biographer as a new application for biologists.

◦ Taye Adeyemi improved the user interface with respect to graph manipulation, traversal and performance. Now graphs can be viewed and manipulated on mobile devices through touch gestures. Furthermore, the improved performance enables rendering of larger graphs which was a problem with the previous implementation.

◦ Chaitanya Talnikar implemented a Boolean simulator extension which enables us to analyze functional aspects of the networks.

To sum it up: this year's Google Summer of Code was again an exciting experience and helped to evolve our project.

By Thomas, Falko, Ben, Till, Matthias, on behalf of the biographer team

These are just four of the 180 organizations that participated in the 2012 Google Summer of Code program. We’re currently accepting organization applications from open source projects to be mentoring organizations in 2013. If your project is interested in applying, don’t delay! Applications close on March 29th.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code Meetups, Episode 2: Chattanooga, TN, USA

2013-03-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

Joel Sherrill, a Google Summer of Code Mentor for the past five years, recently held an informational meet-up on RTEMS and Google Summer of Code, his account of the meetup is below.

UTC IEEE CS Presentation

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga IEEE-CS student chapter hosted presentations on RTEMS and the Google Summer of Code 2013. About twenty-five people were in attendance including two faculty members.

As students entered the room they were greeted with a montage of pictures of some of the projects that use RTEMS including the BMW Superbike, Curiosity, Herschel, Milkymist, Solar Dynamic Observatory, and MMS. There were plenty of questions about the projects, the hardware they used, and how they used RTEMS.

The Google Summer of Code information session started with the official Google Summer of Code slides. It is important to emphasize that all types of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) projects are represented in Google Summer of Code and that all of the organizations are interested in student participation. Being an effective Google Summer of Code organization requires us to provide wish lists, mentors, regular interaction with students, friendly communities, etc. It is important for students to find an organization and project that they are interested in and that inspires them.

Next came the RTEMS specific presentation which very briefly introduces RTEMS but focuses more on recent activities, ongoing activities, and our wish list. It highlights areas in which we want improvements to occur. This is not limited to just source code -- we want improvements in our software development processes and supporting tools as well. I ended the RTEMS part of the session by reminding them that even though I would love to see them all as RTEMS contributors, I would be equally happy to see them involved in the FLOSS community on any project. We are a collection of organizations but do have common goals.

There were questions on both Google Summer of Code in general and RTEMS. The Google Summer of Code questions were interesting:

• One student asked where Google Summer of Code work occurred. The FAQ addresses this and the answer is that the work is performed online, so wherever the student is.

• There were multiple questions on how the mentoring worked. I tried to explain how we interacted with the students including during the proposal phase following through to design discussions, implementation challenges, testing and documentation.

• One student was interested in what mechanisms were used to communicate with the mentors. I described how communication was very rarely face to face because students were usually not in the same location (or even same timezone) as their mentor. The exact mix of communication varies by organization but they could expect any combination of IRC, email lists, chat, forums, and video conferencing. For example, RTEMS relies primarily on email lists, IRC and chat although we are experimenting with Google Hangouts for developer meetings.

Good luck to all of the students applying for Google Summer of Code 2013!

By Joel Sherrill, Google Summer of Code RTEMS Mentor and Organization Administrator

Stay tuned for our next Google Summer of Code meetup post next week. Open source organizations are applying to be mentoring organizations for this year’s program now through Friday, March 29th. You can visit the program timeline for important upcoming dates.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013!

2013-03-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

Interested in finding bright, enthusiastic new contributors to your open source project? Apply to be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code program! We are excited to announce the organization application period is now open.

Now in its ninth year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as academic research, language translations, content management systems, games, and operating systems. Since 2005, over 6,000 students from 90 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 350 mentoring organizations. Students gain exposure to real-world software development while earning a stipend for their work and an opportunity to explore areas related to their academic pursuits, thus “flipping bits, not burgers” during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects as these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

This year we are again encouraging experienced Google Summer of Code mentoring organizations to refer newer, smaller organizations they think could benefit from the program to apply. We hope the referral program will again bring many more new organizations to the Google Summer of Code program. Last year 47 new organizations participated.

The deadline for applying to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code is Friday, March 29th at 19:00 UTC (12pm PST). The list of accepted organizations will be posted on the Google Summer of Code site on Monday, April 8th. Students will then have 13 days to reach out to the accepted organizations to discuss their project ideas before we begin accepting student applications on April 22nd.

Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details on the program. For more information you can check out the Mentor Manual, timeline and join the discussion group. You can also check out the Melange Manual for more information on using the website. Good luck to all of our mentoring organization applicants!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Googlers around the Globe

2013-03-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

To say Googlers will travel to the ends of the Earth to spread the word about open source is not an exaggeration. Members of Google’s Open Source team have started 2013 off with talks all around the globe, and with many more to come in the next few weeks.

February
The year started off in Brussels, Belgium at FOSDEM (February 2-3) where Jeremy Allison spoke about the recent SAMBA release and Cat Allman discussed the Google Summer of Code program with interested attendees.

The Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco on February 20-22 included a keynote on Google’s self driving cars by Andrew Chatham, and Olof Johansson speaking on the organization and maintenance of the arm-soc git tree.

Later in February, Cat Allman traveled to Muscat, Oman to speak at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) about Google Summer of Code at the first bi-annual FOSSC-Oman. The tremendous enthusiasm for free and open source software on the part of the students there will hopefully result in our first Google Summer of Code student from Oman this year.

FOSSC-Oman

March
March is a very busy month this year! Just last week in Tromsø, Norway (inside the Arctic Circle), at the GoOpen Arctic Forum Google Open Source Programs Director, Chris DiBona, gave a talk titled ‘All that we’ve done, all we can do together. Google, Free Software and Open Source’ while Cat Allman discussed ‘Google Summer of Code and FOSS Mentorship on a Global Scale’.

Chris DiBona at GoOpen Arctic Forum in Tromsø, Norway

Coming up this week in Santa Clara, CA, USA at PyCon (March 13-21), Augie Fackler and Nathaniel Manista will be delivering a talk on ‘The End of Object Inheritance & the Beginning of a New Modularity’.

Toward the end of the month, EclipseCon (March 26-28) will take place in Boston, MA, USA where multiple Googlers will be giving talks including Shawn Pearce on Scaling up JGit,
John Micco on Continuous Integration at Google Scale, and Sergey Prigogin on Herding cats and organizing includes.

Googlers will also have a presence at NE GNU Linux Fest (March 16-17) in Boston, MA, USA, and POSSCON in Columbia, SC, USA (March 27-28).

April
April brings the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco where Googlers Konstantin Serebryany, Dmitry Vyukov, and Francesc Campoy Flores will all be speaking. Immediately following this will be the Linux Storage, Filesystem & MM Summit 2013 with several Googlers participating in this invitation-only meeting.

And that’s only a sample. Visit https://developers.google.com/events/ for more opportunites to learn about Google technology and programs, and to hear from Googlers on a wide range of topics.

By Cat Allman and Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code Meetups, Episode 1: Colombo, Sri Lanka

2013-03-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

As the student application period rapidly approaches for Google Summer of Code 2013, past students, mentors, and organization administrators are organizing meetups around the globe to talk with university students interested in participating in this year’s program. Over the next couple of months we will feature posts written by some of these meetup organizers in a special blog series.

Colombo, Sri Lanka meetup: held March 4, 2013
We held our first Google Summer of Code meetup at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (Colombo, Sri Lanka) on the 4th of March 2013. The event was organized with a great deal of support from the Department of Computing. Approximately 150 young enthusiasts took part in the event.

The first speaker was Keshan Sodimana, who is the Manager of Google Developer Group, Sri Lanka. Keshan delivered an excellent presentation on the value of open source software for the world. He explained how the world is heavily dependent on open source infrastructure from the Linux kernel on supercomputers to the Android mobile operating system on millions of phones around the world.

Next, I took to the stage to present the students with an overview of the Google Summer of Code program. I also focused on general open source fundamentals from communication within open source communities to proper email/IRC etiquette and open source culture.

The final speaker was Suranga Nath Kasthurirathne, a mentor and past Google Summer of Code student for OpenMRS. Suranga discussed general information about Google Summer of Code such as important dates for the program, how to apply, guidelines on how to write project proposals, and how students can develop the most suitable project based on their interests.

The meetup concluded with a session on related technologies, including an OpenMRS demonstration and other related tools such as the Student Manual and which would help students prepare for Google Summer of Code 2013. The students were very excited about the program and asked many questions both publicly and individually after the session ended. We tried to clear up doubts they had about their own abilities and encouraged them to participate.

We pointed out the benefits of working on real-life projects, as opposed to the mock projects that they work on in university. We also explained the value of building connections all around the world, and the happiness working on open source projects brings in general. Those of us who had participated as students in previous Google Summer of Code programs shared our experiences on why it was important to continue with a project after Google Summer of Code was over and what benefits it could bring to them.

Good luck to all the hopefuls applying for Google Summer of Code this year!

By Harsha Siriwardena, former Google Summer of Code student for OpenMRS 2012, Google Code-in mentor for the Fedora Project 2012 and Organizer of Google Developer Group Sri Lanka

Stay tuned as we feature more Google Summer of Code meetups over the next 2 months leading up to the student application period, April 22nd-May 3rd.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

Linking students together for a summer

2013-03-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

Metalink improves downloads automatically using mirrors, hashes, and digital signatures. In 2012, Metalink participated for the first time in Google Summer of Code. We had four students (with a fifth via the GNU Project). All five students successfully completed their work, adding not only to our codebase, but also to our community. We learned a great deal from our students and hope we were able to teach them as well. Below is a brief description of the 5 students and their respective projects.

aria2 Web UI and Metalink/HTTP support in DownThemAll! by Hamza Zia
aria2 is a wonderful command line BitTorrent and Metalink client, but the terminal isn't always the best option for everyone and having a Web UI available makes it more accessible to more people. Additional features were also added to the Firefox Addon download manager DownThemAll! this summer. Hamza says, “Before Google Summer of Code I was an amateur web programmer, I had never written or worked with codebases beyond a couple of hundred lines of code. This all changed after the Google Summer of Code program, where with the help of my mentors I was able to approach a large project in manageable chunks and work with some of the very high profile Firefox Addons (DownThemAll!). At the same time I was able to create my own open source project (a web UI for aria2).”

Metalink Downloader Chrome extension by Sundaram Ananthanarayanan
We didn't want Chrome users to be left out, so Sundaram created this extension from scratch.

Metalink/HTTP support in KGet by Aish Raj Dahal
Aish added Metalink features to KGet, the native download manager for KDE. Aish says, "Getting to work on an Internet Standard that spans across platforms, download managers, and browsers has helped me gain an insight into the workings of open standards and implementations of RFCs. The small yet excellent community around Metalink has taught me several aspects of real world open source development for which I shall always be thankful."

wget Metalink support by İlim Uğur
İlim added Metalink support to this ubiquitous command line downloader. This was done with the support of the GNU Project.

Apache Traffic Server cache hits for download mirrors via Metalink by Jack Bates
The same exact file downloaded from different mirrors isn't automatically detected as already present in proxy caches. Jack had a busy summer, doing double duty online with Google Summer of Code via GPRS modem and sometimes by candlelight, while also volunteering at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village for orphans in Rwanda for a year. Jack says, "This project aims to address the number of times the same large files are transferred over the same internet connection, because large files are often distributed from many different mirrors or a content distribution network. This is sometimes called duplicate transfer detection and is especially helpful where a lot of people share one small, congested internet connection, like at the rural village in Rwanda where I was a volunteer."

Thanks to our students, mentors, all other contributors and supporters, and the Google Open Source Programs Office people who arrange such cool things. The Mentor Summit was tremendous and we are thankful for the whole Google Summer of Code experience.

By Ant Bryan, Metalink Organization Administrator

Dare to try: a story of summer triumph

2013-03-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

Guest post by Anna Senarclens de Grancy, former Google Summer of Code student and recent mentor for Systers

Check out this inspirational story from a previous Google Summer of Code student (for 2 years) who went on to become a two time Google Summer of Code mentor in the program. If other students are unsure of whether they have what it takes to get involved in the program, read on and consider applying to Google Summer of Code 2013.

This is my story of how I did what anybody could have done but not everybody would. I dared to try something new and found out that with a little bit of guts, some luck, and support from people at Systers I can do almost anything.

My mum realized I’d likely become an engineer when at the age of two I was managing multiple remote controls better than most adults. Later on I confirmed her beliefs by attending a technical upper secondary school followed by a technical university. After some time in college I had to pick what field of engineering to pursue. I took an introductory course programming in Ada with a friend who told me there was no way I could do CS. I took this quite hard because, even though I wasn’t very good at it, programming had been a lot of fun. As a result, I decided to pick mechanical engineering instead of CS which means that I’m not a computer scientist. Then a friendly computer geek passionate about open source software introduced me to this whole new world.

Newly inspired I realized I wanted to give CS a second chance, this time as a hobby. I got some books on Python and began learning on my own in the evenings and during weekends. Learning from a book is all fine but there is only so much one can do before one wants a challenge and to try something out for real. Someone suggested I check out Google Summer of Code, and when I did, I found Systers. I was fascinated by their mission and since they were offering a project in Python for beginners, I gave it a try. I had never really done any real programming before, nor did I have any experience with databases or distributed revision control. My Python knowledge was mainly from books and I hadn’t taken many computer science classes in college. I had a lot to learn, but you can hardly imagine how much fun I had doing it! I dared myself to try and ended up having the summer of my life. Sure there were hard times trying to understand the code, what to do, and how to do it. In my ignorance I changed, moved, and removed enough things on my computer to have to reinstall Ubuntu three times and Mailman probably five or six times. I had sleepless nights sitting in front of the computer coding, and when I slept I dreamt of bugs. I added what seemed like a million debug statements and often got nonsense back (at that time I didn’t know how to use a debugger).

Once I solved my first bug and got the taste of success and the feeling of I might actually be able to do this, I was hooked. So much fun! Such great feedback from Systers, they were always friendly, patient, and willing to help answer my questions. It’s such an ego boost when you solve that one problem you’ve been working on for days or even weeks. I dared to try something new and ended up learning a lot and having a great time while doing so. I lived the dream and also got to know amazing people along the way. The only thing it took was making that first step.

Have you ever considered how easy it might be to fix a bug in your favorite open source software program? I encourage each of you to give it a try!

By Anna Senarclens de Grancy, Google Summer of Code former student and mentor

As this story illustrates, you don’t have to be a CS major or have 10 years of coding experience to be a part of Google Summer of Code, you just need to have a desire to learn and to push yourself. The participating mentoring organizations will be announced on April 8th, students then have two weeks to discuss application ideas with the organizations. On April 22nd, student applications open for Google Summer of Code 2013.

Compress Data More Densely with Zopfli

2013-02-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

The Zopfli Compression Algorithm is a new, open sourced general purpose data compression library that got its name from a Swiss bread recipe. It is an implementation of the Deflate compression algorithm that creates a smaller output size compared to previous techniques. The smaller compressed size allows for better space utilization, faster data transmission, and lower web page load latencies. Furthermore, the smaller compressed size has additional benefits in mobile use, such as lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use. The higher data density is achieved by using more exhaustive compression techniques, which make the compression a lot slower, but do not affect the decompression speed. The exhaustive method is based on iterating entropy modeling and a shortest path search algorithm to find a low bit cost path through the graph of all possible deflate representations.

The output generated by Zopfli is typically 3–8% smaller compared to zlib at maximum compression, and we believe that Zopfli represents the state of the art in Deflate-compatible compression. Zopfli is written in C for portability. It is a compression-only library; existing software can decompress the data. Zopfli is bit-stream compatible with compression used in gzip, Zip, PNG, HTTP requests, and others.

Due to the amount of CPU time required, 2–3 orders of magnitude more than zlib at maximum quality, Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network many times — for example, static content for the web. By open sourcing Zopfli, thus allowing webmasters to better optimize the size of frequently accessed static content, we hope to make the Internet a bit faster for all of us.

By Lode Vandevenne, Software Engineer, Compression Team