Saturday, May 31, 2008

UOM does great at GSoC

Google Summer of Code is an annual competition targeting open source software development. The event brings together some talented individuals from all over the world in an attempt to win $ 4500 as a reward for successful participation. Even though participation is rewarding, not all are allowed to take part. You must get selected.

Selection for participation in Google Summer of Code happens internally within various open source software development organizations and selected individuals are announced by Google. This year around 1125 students were offered funding and the University of Moratuwa has become the number one university in terms of participants.

Sri Lanka being a really small country in size, and population has not many individuals involved in software development as a whole. However, it has been discovered that Sri Lanka is the number one per capita contributor to open source as well, meaning that the percentage of developers working on open source development against all software developers is much higher than the rest of the world. And, Google Summer of Code has proved this fact.

Shown below is a pie-chart depicting the top 10 participating universities. More information is found on the Google Open Source Blog.