Google Summer of Code : Open Source Education
Google Summer of Code (or GsoC for short) is a global open source programming showdown for students to showcase their programming skills. If judged to be worthy enough, Google would sponsor those projects with generous stipends. Till last year, in 2007, inviting over 1500 students from across 90 different countries, Google Summer of Code was a grand success bringing out not just young innovative talent, but also promising open source tools.
This year, in 2008 there over 180 different organizations mentoring the students and their projects. This long list includes Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Wordpress, Free Software Foundation and many more. Many students chose to work under one of these organizations and end up making really innovative add-ons, extensions or plugins optimized for the organization's software. That way their project is featured not just on the software's portals, but also Google Summer of Code mini-site. This finally ends up becoming the students claim to fame.