Google and a Summer of Fun

Google and a Summer of Fun

It's been a while since I've blogged, and not without a good reason. Since I got back from Spring Break, this semester has kicked my butt back into the stone ages, making it really difficult to even think about working on some of the projects I had in mind. On the plus side though, I did at least manage to get my summer planned out.

This summer, we'll be having someone work on a Google Summer of Code project. The goal of the project is to find new ways to show off all the data we've been collecting in Smolt, and create a fun new web site to showcase it all off. Pavel Khardikov has shown us some very interesting mock ups, some in Russian, and some in English that look promising. Hopefully sometime in the next few days, he'll make his formal acquaintance to everyone in the Fedora Community.

The overall balance of GSoC Projects for Fedora and JBoss looks very good too. I've heard some reservations about having JBoss work with us, but I think it's a great idea. Since Red Hat owns JBoss, and controls a significant part of Fedora, it seems fitting that there is cooperation at the community level, and not just the corporate level. While many people use Fedora as their desktop, I have this feeling that Fedora, JBoss, and CentOS are going to see more growth in the enterprise level than at the consumer desktop level. We have a lot of unique tools that are very well suited to that sort of thing.

The other notable item is that Transifex has a total of 25% of the slots. Although it might seem one sided, it has a very unique advantage. Transifex is a service that is available to the entire Open Source community at large, and really showcases Fedora's ability to build communities. Fedora is not just an operating system, and our willingness to focus on more service based tools is a Good Thing (TM)

As for myself, I will be working as an intern for Red Hat again this summer, but this time primarily for Fedora. I'll be reporting to Mike officially (surprise, surprise), but I will be working abroad. Max is going to be moving to Europe to start working on Open Source Activism and I look forward to being able to help him with this.

As soon as I finish the last of my papers and finals, I will be paying more attention to the community again. First and foremost, I have to finish up this business with the Haskell Packaging Guidelines. I'm really looking forward to getting back to work on it in a few days.