Students Are Missing Out On An Incredible Opportunity To Get Involved With Mesa, Wayland

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 1 April 2017 at 09:25 AM EDT. 26 Comments
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For student developers wishing to look for an interesting summer project while being paid by Google, the GSoC application deadlines are on Monday, 3 April. Sadly, the X.Org/Wayland/Mesa turnout so far for applicants are very low.

At this week's X.Org Foundation Board of Directors meeting, they acknowledged so far there are only two applicants interested in working on "X.Org" projects this summer -- the X.Org Foundation's participation also incorporates Wayland, Mesa, libinput, DRM and related parts of the stack.

This is a pity to see only two students so far interested in possibly getting involved with these important pieces to Linux gaming and the Linux desktop. There are a lot of interesting projects to work on and many will agree that Wayland/Mesa/X.Org could use all the help it can get.

There are also many success stories of former GSoC X.Org student developers going on to making a career out of their work... Among the successes that come to mind are former GSoC'er Samuel Pitoiset who was working on the Nouveau stack had continued his contributions and went on to now working for Valve on the Radeon driver stack. Tom Stellard was long ago a GSoC student working on the Radeon GLSL compiler and then went on to be employed by AMD and now Red Hat. Timothy Arceri wasn't a GSoC student but went from doing crowd-funded work to learn Mesa development to working for Collabora and now Valve. Martin Peres went from being a student developer hacking on Nouveau to now working at Intel on their driver stack. Collabora also recently hired a GSoC student just from last year that's been working on the soft FP64 support. And there are so many other successes for those that get involved with free software graphics drivers to now being successfully employed in the field with there being a shortage of experienced Linux graphics driver developers.

So if you are an eligible student for GSoC and interested in open-source development, I highly recommend checking out their GSoC ideas page. Among the 2017 ideas are improvements to Mesa's OpenMAX and VDPAU state trackers, replacing DriConf, Nouveau improvements, DRM clean-ups, and more. For applying or to see other participating projects, see the GSoC site. Deadlines are Monday!
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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