The projects are in and the mentors have filed their evaluations. In the final tally, it looks like Google's Summer of Code 2006 was a success.

The program, having just finished its second year, provides funding to students and open source organizations for project development.

In 2005, Google accepted 410 projects. In 2006, Google's Summer of Code accepted a whopping 630 projects spread across 102 mentoring organizations. In 2005, there were only 41 mentoring organizations.

Each student who successfully completed their projects over the summer were to receive $4,500 from Google, while each open source organization was to receive $500 per successful student.

Leslie Hawthorn, open source program co-coordinator at Google, told internetnews.com that the program had an 82 percent overall success rate in 2006.

For those who didn't complete the program, Hawthorn didn't see any one common thread.

"More often than not it was a 'life happens' situation when students drop out," Hawthorn said.

Hawthorn and Chris DiBona, open source program manger at Google, cited one particular student effort as being somewhat of a surprise.

Steffen Pingel was voted in as a committer for the Eclipse Mylar project as a result of his Summer of Code efforts.

"Think about it, this student went from being a college student who knew nobody in the project to becoming a peer with people from everyone from IBM to BEA to you name it in just a matter of a summer," DiBona said.

Another interesting effort cited by DiBona yielded an OpenGL GUI Widget system in Ruby.

"Being able to do that within the framework of Ruby along with OpenGL so now you can make a program in Ruby that can run on any platform that will give you a great user interface is a cool idea," DiBona said.

Google was also a mentoring organization for the Summer of Code, though students didn't necessarily work on projects directly for Google.

Full article: internetnews.com