Google Is Financing A Lot Of Great Open-Source Work This Summer

Google just announced their list of accepted student projects for this year's Google Summer of Code. After going through all of the projects on the list for the different upstream open-source projects involved, there's a ton of improvements to be worked on by students this summer and financed by Google. This is perhaps the most exciting Google Summer of Code ever.

After going through the list of projects, what I find to be most interesting about GSoC 2014 include:

- The seven X.Org/Wayland/Mesa projects.

- Wine work to implement/improve the Direct3D 9 graphics APIs. The work will add currently not implemented D3D9 APIs and improve the existing code-paths.

- The Eclipse Foundation will hopefully see a port of the SWT widget toolkit to Wayland. This is work towards ultimately porting the Eclipse IDE to Wayland.

- CGE2 engine work within ScummVM.

- Improvements to the Mono Runtime.

- A self-tuning optimizer for MariaDB.

- Clang-highlight as a new LLVM library to provide high-quality syntax highlighting.

- VLC will hopefully get multi-CPU support for improving the software performance under heavy CPU usage.

- Porting Plasma Active Shell to libplasma2 and QML2.

- Integrating Plasma Media Center with Plasma-Next and porting to KDE Frameworks 5 and the Qt 5 tool-kit.

- Porting Google's Go language to be supported by the Haiku operating system.

- UEFI boot-loader support for Haiku. Separately, libusb support for the operating system.

- Work to get the Haiku ARM port up to scratch and running on newer ARM hardware.

- Foursquare and Facebook integration within GNOME Maps.

- Snapshotting/Cloning support for virtual machines within the GNOME Boxes virtualization application.

- Porting FreeBSD to the Android emulator as some are interested in bringing FreeBSD to smartphones.

- Debian Clang as a rebuild of the Debian archive with LLVM's Clang compiler rather than GCC.

- Flashrom improvements and general maintenance for this open-source app out of Coreboot.

- Boost.XML as a standard XML library for the Boost C++ libraries.

- SDL2 porting and hardware acceleration work within the Battle for Wesnoth open-source game.

- Cleanups and improvements to BGE, the Blender Game Engine.

These are just the GSoC 2014 items that caught my interest... There's many more projects that will be tackled by accepted students and the list in full is listed at Google-Melange.com. Good luck to all the students involved and hopefully these projects will turn out to be successes at large.