Google has announced that it will accept no fewer than a whopping 630 open source projects for this year's Summer of Code. The number is up from last year's 410 projects.

Google's Summer of Code initiative provides sponsorship funding for students to work at mentoring open source projects over the summer. Chris DiBona, open source program manager at Google, told internetnews.com that Google received nearly 6,400 applications this year.

The increased number of awarded projects this year corresponds with an increase in the number of mentoring organizations.

The 630 Google Summer of Code 2006 projects are spread across 102 mentoring organizations, including Google itself. Last summer there were only 41 mentoring organizations.

The potential total payout by Google as a result also goes up. The financial part of the initiative stipulates that Google will shell out $5,000 per student developer, $500 of which goes to the mentoring organization and $4,500 goes to the student.

That means Google is pumping $3.15 million dollars into the open source ecosystem with this effort this year, up from $2.05 million last year.


Full article: internetnews.com