Google Supports Open Source Initiatives

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski announced at a press conference a $350,000 contribution from Google to a joint open source technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State University.

"Summer of Code developers made major improvements to the Nmap Security Scanner, including a more powerful graphical interface and a next-generation remote operating system detection framework," said Fyodor Vaskovich, lead developer at Nmap.

With the grant, the universities will collaborate to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide.

"We're extremely excited about the Oregon university open source initiative and thankful for Google's generous support," said Governor Kulongoski. This initiative will help our universities build on their leadership role in fostering the next generation of open source technologies, projects and experts in Oregon and around the world."

This summer, Google also funded a $2 million "Summer of Code" program to offer students an opportunity to work on technical projects between school years rather than put their programming aside to work a summer job.

From a pool of 8,744 applicants, more than 400 students from 49 countries successfully completed open source projects reaching into all corners of computer science and received grants of $4,500 each for their outstanding work.

Google partnered with approximately 40 open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund summer projects and mentor participating students. These groups included both large organizations like Apache and Samba and smaller projects such as Nmap, Gaim and Internet2.