Preparing for GSoC 2008

GSoC 2008 is already here! We are preparing our submision for CLAM as organization and I hope we are as lucky as last year. For GSoC 2007 we got 6 fervent students who pushed CLAM a big step forward. We still don't know whether we will be selected as organization or not. We haven't even filled the submision data. But it is time to trigger some resorts. So, what to do now?

If you are an experienced CLAM developer, please consider becoming a mentor. The more mentors the more students we can cope with.

If you are a user, is the time to push your favourite feature into the GSoC project proposals.

If you are an student wanting to be part of the program, I advice you to get involved with the project from now as we will consider early involvement a big plus for eligibility.

If you are Xavi, Pau or myself, then you should fill CLAM submision instead of blogging ;-)

I love summer.

GSoC 2007 mentor submit

A couple of weeks ago, Pau and me were at San Francisco for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Submit. At the submit we joined some interesting sessions on how to improve the next GSoC, but also we met a lot of other hackers of free software projects all around the world: Mixxx, Inkscape, KDE, Amarok, Pidgin, Scumvm, Haiku, Crystal Space, Ogre, Moin Moin, Drupal, VideoLan, XMMS2, audacious... Well, as you can see in this picture we were pretty much people:



I knew about most of all other projects, but, sadly, nearly no one knew about CLAM. :-( The good news is that most of them get pretty interested as they saw CLAM capabilities on audio processing and application prototyping. We need independently packaged end user tools!!

I also was glad to confirm the collaboration between projects that one could figure out being competitors:

• People working on desktops (KDE, Gnome...) are in fact in a very close collaboration.
• Wiki implementations (Moin Moin, Wikimedia...) meet there
• Also several 3D engines (Crystal Space, Ogre...) met there
• Comunity portals such as Drupal, Joomla, Plone...

They all share common challenges and solutions and they used the submit to join efforts.

Related to common issues and efforts, we took a very productive meeting on multiplatform development where some multiplatform projects, including us, shared experiences. We explained how we faced such problem at CLAM: the use of portable 3rd party libraries, crosscompiling from Linux to other platforms, and the use of testfarm to rapidly detect multiplatform issues. Some projects, such VideoLan had automated third party compilation scripts a step we have not automated at all. We realized that a lot of people was also solving such problems and we compromised to share experiences and results. For example, we talked about having a single repository of precompiled binaries of third party libraries. We also realized about our not-so-open-source mind we most of us realized that we were not reporting back patches we did to external libraries. We compromised to send them to upstream or making them available in a common place for the other project using them.