Category: Technology

So, it is here again! The wonderful time of spring. Projects that were lucky enough to be selected by Google look for talented students. And students that care enough about open source try to find a matching project. LibreOffice was selected as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code again this year. And today, it is the first day when students can submit their applications. We would like you to convince you that LibreOffice is indeed the best choice for you if you are a student looking to impact the open source scene in a permanent way.

LibreOffice empowers you!

LibreOffice is a project of many volunteers and paid developers. Whether you are employee of one of the many companies that contribute to LibreOffice, or volunteer representing yourself only, you are handled in the same way and only your capacities dictate what you can and cannot do. It is not unusual to find a volunteer contributor being part of decisions about technical directions of the project.

The code you will produce during the summer will be going directly to the LibreOffice git repository. We always do our best in order to see student’s work integrated in the next big release.

Participation in Google Summer of Code with LibreOffice is good for your career!

Some of you might remember that last year we had several extremely successful Google Summer of Code projects. Two of our successful students are currently employed working on free and opensource software as a direct consequence of their participation in the program. Eilidh McAdam implemented a Visio import filter that is one of the flagship features of LibreOffice 3.5. Eilidh has been employed by Lanedo before she even was able to complete her PhD degree. Miklos Vajna worked in 2010 on RTF export filter and in 2011 on RTF import. As soon as he finished his studies, he was hired by SUSE to work on LibreOffice.

This is not always the case of course, but they were neither the first nor last to find paid opportunities in the project.

Wide choice of projects and mentors

Our GSoC Ideas wiki page is containing more then 40 different proposals in each and every corner of LibreOffice code-base. From import filter for Microsoft Publisher file-format to support of sqlite in LibreOffice Base, from hacking on collaborative feature to performance improvements in Calc, everybody can find the shoe for her feet.

LibreOffice project is full of dedicated mentors that know how to work with people that don’t share with them the room next door or even the same timezone. The community is friendly and welcoming.

How to apply

Convinced? We hope so. So, here is how to proceed.

• Present yourself. Since we don’t know you we want to know some bits like your name, education, email, nickname on the LibreOffice IRC channel.
• Prove that you want to get involved into LibreOffice. In order to check this we require students to complete one of the Easy programming tasks on the Easy_Hacks page (or part of one if that EasyHack is a selection of separate tasks), though the dead-line for this isn’t hard but needs to be somewhere before the end of the selection process. This means that each student who wants to have chances to be picked for a LibreOffice project will need to build the whole application, fix a bug and submit the patch to the development mailing list. See the Development page for more infos on this.
• Explain what you want to achieve. Provide detailed informations on the project you want to work on and the use cases. The better you described it the better it is for us. It is best to base your project on one of our Ideas that come complete with friendly mentors to help you.
• How do you plan to achieve it?Provide us the following:
  • An estimated schedule for the summer (including any potential conflicts you could have like courses, exams…)
  • Technical details on how you want to implement it. The more sensible details you provide the easier it will be for us to check that you understood the problem and difficulty.
• Why should we choose you? Give us all the reasons for choosing you. Any past open source hacking is interesting us as well as your hacking and socializing skills.

LibreOffice community is looking forward to an enjoyable and productive summer with you.