RSSGoogle to Students: Try Open Source
By Ed Oswald | Published June 1, 2005, 11:10 AM
Search giant Google has announced a contest that is intended to introduce aspiring developers to open source software. To sweeten the pot, Google will give $4,500 to each student who completes an open source project. Several groups are participating, including Gnome, Apache and The Wine Project, among others.
Google made several of its open source projects available to give students an idea of what the company is looking for. "By pairing applicants up with the proven wisdom and experience of established prominent open source organizations, we hope to make great software happen," Google wrote on Summer of Code Web site. The deadline for application is June 14.
Almost all of my installed programs are freeware or open-source. And all of them are working perfectly: Firefox, Maxthon, Xp-antispy, cashman, everest, process explorer, spybot, adaware se..and the list could go on. U don't have to pay a lot of money if others are smart enough to make same software for free. And especialy when not money are priority and hundreads of people are involved in making that software better.
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|This looks a lot like what's happening over at DonationCoder.com, where programmers work on small, specific useful apps, get feedback, and then publish them. The one thing I don't want, however, is for Google to make another $1billion off of some kid's idea. $4,500 is spit, given the USD is at its lowest value in four generations. Pay me in Euro, then we'll talk.
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|Interesting... "completes a project"... that sounds sort of vague...
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|Open Source, is terrible. I have not found one program that open source offers that is even usable for me. Firefox was terrible, OpenOffice was terrible, Linux was terriable. I use and standby IE, MS Office, & Windows, all three go above and beyond what I ask them to do. But I will agree that IE does need improvments.
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|can you say Troll???....Good I thought you could.
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|First, there is not just one "Linux." It's a kernel, not an entire operating system, and what most people perceive as the OS is really just the desktop environment, typically KDE or GNOME. I'll agree that Linux is still a bit more difficult than Windows, but I can recommend Ubuntu as one that is relatively easy to use. I've also tried SuSE and Fedora, which are good but require a bit of tweaking for me to get them the way I like it.
OpenOffice.org is progressing, and all I can ask for is more stability (but I'm using a beta, so that's what I get) and interface improvements. It's a bit different from MS Office, but it does everything I need. But the price is right, and it's cross-platform. Buy Office if you want.
Firefox is, for me, the one of the best open-source applications I have ever used. Unfortunately, all you seem to say is that it (and everything else you tried) was "terrible," so I'm afraid there's not much anyone can do for you. If you want to be like that, then I can say that Windows and IE were terrible for my school, my friends, and others because they caused a lot of problems. Firefox is simple, secure, and offers a ton of features without being bloated that IE does not. Tabbed browsing is something I can no longer browse without, and I appreciate its respect for Web standards, something any Web developer (who knows what he or she is doing, anyway--not the people who save as HTML in Word and call it a Web page) would.
Open-source is generally improving. A program is not "terrible" as you say just because it is (or is not) open-source.
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|He's a troll. Notice his criticism yet no justification for said criticism. troll. troll. troll.
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|I use Ubuntu (Hoary) and, although a step in the right direction, it's an understatement to say that it's a little harder than Windows. It's still considerably harder than Windows given that Windows XP has Wizards galore to get grandma's pc up and running. Indeed, right from the get-go XP detects and installs devices for hardware almost flawlessly. It's pretty impressive if one takes into consideration all the variables. I'm not a fanboy of M$, but they know how to deliver (even if often expensively, i.e., Office, which for the most part is bloatware). At any rate, it's still a chore to get plugins working in supoorted browsers in Linux and to run a network. Even installing programs is not for the faint of heart. Tweaking video refresh rates, for instance, is cumbersome, to say the least. I won't even mention 3D games. Linux, the idea of Linux, is great. But it will take some time yet to say that it's just "a bit more difficult than Windows." Things just work in Windows. No wonder, over 90% of the stuff out there is programmed for it.
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|USE AVANT BROWSER TO SERF THE INTERNET IT IS SAFE
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|MS can make other contest for the most horrid bloat of the world....
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|Match making services are 50/50. Hopefully some experienced people will join the ranks.
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