Every summer since 2005, Google has offered what is essentially a paid internship to open source groups. Students are offered the opportunity to work with open source development groups to complete projects, often resulting in significant advances for both the student’s knowledge and the developments they’ve worked on. These projects, combined or otherwise, are some of the biggest successes we’ve seen come out of Google’s Summer of Code.

1. Gaim: The Gaim instant messaging project benefited greatly from Summer of Code, getting helpful updates that made it into the client’s 2.0 version, Pidgin.
2. Neuros OSD: This audio/video recording and playback device is committed to open source, but had non-open source DSP code in order to get on the market faster. Google Summer of Code students created an open source "bridge" that enabled open source codecs to be used.
3. Ruby’s Open GL GUI: A successful Ruby project was able to create a widget system that allows platform-free development. This OpenGL GUI widget system makes it possible for Ruby developers to create programs in Ruby that will run on any platform.
4. Mono: Mono had a number of successful projects come out of Google’s 2006 Summer of Code. Most notable was the ASP.NET GUI editor, which created a stepping stone to hosting an editor within MonoDevelop.
5. Jabber: Like Mono, Jabber had a good round in 2006. Project contributions included improved support, menus, tabs, and contact lists. All said, Jabber reports that these projects have helped them get ahead by months on some high priority projects.
6. Drupal: In this project, the Drupal content management system was mixed up with Google Apps, adding support for single sign-on and allowing for Google-hosted accounts. Because of this project’s contribution, Drupal users now have Google domain accounts created automatically for added users and can take advantage of automatic sign-on.
7. XUL/XPCOM Kiosk: This project set out to improve upon the offerings of existing kiosk tools and involved building a kiosk browser from scratch. Ultimately, this project resulted in a cross-platform kiosk-mode browser with operating system integration and security that outranks current offerings.
8. KOffice: A part of KDE, KOffice got a shot in the arm from the 2006 Summer of Code. Five students offered improvements including upgrades to Krita, document support, tree views, version support, and support for encrypted documents.
9. Gallery: Gallery benefited from 11 successful projects in the 2005 Summer of Code. The contributions ranged from an Ajax theme to detection of duplicate images and Zen Cart integration. These high profile projects were specifically requested from users and have been implemented in Gallery’s new releases.
10. Debian: This past summer, Debian enjoyed a 100% success rate, with 9 out of 9 successful projects. Accomplished this summer were a GUI for Live Helper, a virtual live OS upgrade testing suite, a bug triage tool, DebTorrent, and more. They’re all currently available for use.