Google man proclaims "Summer of Code"

"SUMMER OF CODE!" Chris DiBona says immediately when asked what he'd like to talk about. For three years, DiBona has been open source programs manager for Google. Summer of Code was his implementation of an idea Google had been kicking around: computer science students don't code in the summers.

"Flip bits, not burgers.".

This year, Google is funding 917 students to work in 131 organisations on open source projects. Each student gets $500 on acceptance, $2,000 midway, and $2,000 for finishing. The UK has the fourth largest group of students.

DiBona has a lengthy background in open source. After a brief sojourn at the State Department evaluating technology while he was still in college, DiBona worked at Tandem on smart card identification methods, and then co-founded Strong Crypto. When that failed to get funding, he spent four years at VA Linux, a year as a Slashdot editor, and then did a second failed start-up, the game company, Damage Studios.

When he arrived at Google, "Compliance was the most important thing to me." Fortunately, "Google's a very refreshing environment for someone who does what I do." Where in many companies he'd have had to try to make people comfortable with open source software, "Google's different. The compliance mission was pretty easy because the engineers just wanted to know they could use it as efficiently as possible."

DiBona says he trusts the engineers. " A smart engineer wants to bring in code from the outside world, fast and correctly. They want us to comply with licences. We don't make the technical decisions. We go to the engineers and say if they want to use this library, here are the obligations, and we let them make that decision. They don't have to get approval."

Google uses open source software for its infrastructure - the Linux kernel, Apache, SSH, various languages and compilers - and as building blocks. "No company," he says for example,"should be writing its own crypto tools. You should use the most trusted ones."

The difficulty, of course, is the proliferation of open source licences - more than 60 are approved by the Open Source Institute. He is, he told the assembly at Google's recent Developer Day (London branch), "happy" about the latest draft - version three - of the Free Software Foundation's General Public Licence, despite the controversial anti-patent and anti-digital rights management clauses. "If you know [FSF founder and GPL inventor] Richard Stallman, you know that's the fight he really wants to fight.." And, he added, "Google has the same problem with software patents as everyone else, except that we have deep pockets, so we're a target."

Why open source? It's more cost-efficient to buy commodity hardware and build reliability into software. Open source gives Google control, ownership, and independence from external software companies, which also means not giving other companies incentives to "hurt us". The software is adaptable and flexible and, he says, "We don't have to show our hand if we want to do something unusual." The company doesn't have to ask permission to fix problems, "especially of people who might want to say no", and open source appeals to the "Google ethic".

In addition, he says, "We're still a very young company, and we're not as big as the people who really don't like us. So sometimes external people are told not to talk to us. Open source makes the world a little less tough."

DiBona is also in charge of Google's code site, which he says is the second largest online respository. "We've released a ton of code," he says, including many patches and 65 projects; the company also pays various people who work on open source. Around the net, you find criticism that Google doesn't give enough back to the open source community, but, says DiBona, "It doesn't matter to me, honestly, that the average non-developer thinks we don't do much in open source. What's important is that the developers understand what we do with open source."

He adds, "One thing in open source that doesn't get written about enough is I think people miss the idealism. The reason I keep returning to it in my career is that people have amazing ideas and morals. I wish it was recognised more."

Which comes back to Summer of Code. DiBona easily lists results that have impressed him. One student, working on the Diva video editing project, created an entire video application from scratch. Another learned enough about compilers and how developers use them to add a new option.

"It sounds minor, but it was quite an achievement." Finally, "One student funded a business in his country for two years off Summer of Code." µ