BHU & BITS among top-10 (World Wide) in Google Summer of Code

This story is taken from :
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/BHU-among-top-10-in-Google-Summer-of-Code/articleshow/5183855.cms
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Title : BHU among top-10 in Google Summer of Code
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two Indian institutions -the Institute of Technology, Banaras
Hindu University (IT-BHU) and Birla Institute of Technology and
Science
(BITS) Pilani- are among the top-10 institutions worldwide in Google
Summer of Code (GSoC)-2009.
The GSoC is a global programme that offers student developers stipends
to write code for various open source software projects. This annual
programme awards stipends to hundreds of students who successfully
complete a requested free software / open-source coding project during
the summer.

"The students from IT-BHU and BITS Pilani have been recognised by
the GSoC 2009 for writing code for various open source projects," said
Praharsh Sharma, electronics engineering student of IT-BHU. According
to him, the open source offers easy accessibility to softwares source
code and, therefore, its design and development. The GSoC project was
started in 2005 and the programme has brought together nearly 2,500
successful student participants and 2,500 mentors from 98 countries
worldwide. The selected students get a sum of USD 4,500 or Rs 2 lakh
for contributing to the Google repository of Open Source Code.

According to the IT-BHU Chronicle, as many as eight students of
IT-BHU have been selected for the programme in 2009 while nine
students have been selected from BITS Pilani. Sharma said so far, 12
students had been selected for the project-- one in 2007, three in
2008 and eight in 2009.

"As GSoC Student, I worked on the project 'Online Screenshot
Annotator'. There can't be anything better to do during summers. I
learned javascript and php. Besides enhancing my coding skills, it
gave me insight to distributed development of software, like project
documentation, and most importantly learned to make my code speak to
others," said Shishir Mittal, the IT-BHU student selected in 2008. The
other IT-BHU students selected in 2009 are Atul Aggarwal, Shashank
Tyagi, Mahanth Gowda, Rahul Verma, Chandan Kumar, Gaurav Kejriwal,
Ajay Chhatwal and Pushkal.

Through GSoC, accepted applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors
from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world
software development scenario and the opportunity for employment in
areas related to their academic pursuits. The programme benefits
everyone - students get an inspiring and meaningful summer job,
mentoring organisations get help with their projects and the world
gets more 'Open Source' software.

Posted via email from LUG@IITD Community Blog