Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Organizations announced!

Google has again announced the mentor organizations that will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2010.

For those that are not familiar with the Google Summer of Code program, here is Google's explanation from the Summer of Code 2010 website:

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than more than 3,000 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

The complete list of mentor organizations for GSoC 2010 is available here, but I'd like to highlight some of the organizations:

• The Battle for Wesnoth - A free, turn based strategy game, open to customization and portable to a wide variety of operating systems (Win, Mac, Linux, Maemo, Amiga, Solaris, RISC OS, OS/2, etc.).
• beagleboard.org - group dedicated to developing powerful and open embedded systems. Makers of the Beagle Board.
• CoreBoot- A project aimed at replacing proprietary BIOS systems with open, modifiable ones.
• Drupal - Open source web content management. The framework that runs whitehouse.gov, linux.com, linuxjournal.com, and other large websites.
• Etherboot - Organization responsible for gPXE, an open source network bootloader
• Rockbox - An open source firmware for mp3 players, developed from scratch.
• The Linux Foundation - Organization that employs Linus Torvalds. It promotes, protects, and standardizes the use of Linux worldwide.

It is wonderful to see so many great projects will be receiving support through Google's Summer of Code this year. I look forward to the innovation that results from this influx of talented coders to high quality open source projects.