students

It's official! Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine. This is one more student than last year's eight sponsored by the GSoC alone! Shown below are the four selected students and their projects, in the order that the community ranked them through the Haiku Code Drive poll:

Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API

Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port

Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation

JiSheng Zhang: DV media node

The response from the community to our call for donations to fund this program was incredible. In just two weeks, we received 120 donations from 24 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA), for a total of approximately $7,500. The promptness, degree of generosity, and global reach of the response by the community to the Haiku Code Drive is unprecedented in the history of our project, and hopefully a sign of things to come in the future.

Google assigned Haiku five student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008, so we had to narrow down our final choice from the many high quality student applications. This was tough: many good applications had to be left out, and we really hate leaving people out, particularly those who had shown an interest in Haiku. So we started entertaining the idea of sponsoring a few of these students ourselves. Today we introduce you to the Haiku Code Drive 2008, a program designed to raise funds from the community in order to sponsor students to produce code for Haiku. This is how it's going to work.

We contacted all the GSoC students that applied for Haiku but did not make it, and asked them if they were interested in carrying out their proposed project for a $2,500 stipend each. From their response, we have created this list of students and their projects; these are the candidates for the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program. Now we are asking you, the Haiku community, to fund the program by making donations. We will then hold a public poll so that the community can influence which candidates/projects they want to sponsor. At the end of the poll/donation period, we will determine how many and which of the students will be sponsored based on the donated funds and the results of the poll. Check out all the details of the program here, including a timeline with tentative dates.

We are very pleased to announce that, for the second straight year, Haiku has been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code. The student application period will start soon, so if you are a student who would like to work on a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008, please check out our List of GSoC Ideas and Students: How to Apply pages for detailed information on how to apply. If you still have any questions specific to GSoC after reading these pages, please contact the Haiku GSoC administrator (Bruno Albuquerque). If you have any general questions about Haiku and want to start familiarizing yourself with our community, which we encourage you to, please join the Haiku development mailing list and also feel free to stop by the #haiku IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Our friendly community members will be glad to help you out in pursuing a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008 and beyond.