Organization id
freebsd
Organization name
FreeBSD
Organization description
The FreeBSD Project is a large, mature, and yet relatively tightly knit organization. The FreeBSD Project began 15 years ago in 1993, but is based on the work at Berkeley CSRG with open source revision history going back 30 years to 1978.
There are currently over 300 developers with write access to the main revision control system, and hundreds more with access to our Perforce servers for experimental and third party development (this is also where our summer of code students have worked in previous years). We have an active mentoring program to bring all new developers into our community, not just those that we introduce to FreeBSD through the GSoC. There are hundreds of mailing lists, forums, blogs, IRC channels, and user groups all detailed on our main website. FreeBSD offers a complete operating system in which students can work, not just a kernel or specific userland stack. This allows for interesting work that spans the userland/kernel boundary.
In addition to producing an operating system, FreeBSD has incubated the development of key pieces of infrastructure which are used by other open source projects including bsnmp, jemalloc, libarchive, OpenBSM, and OpenPAM.
Organization home page url
Backup Admin
rwatson
Why has your org chosen to participate in Google Code-in?
First and formost, we hope to attract more young people within 13-17 age range to use FreeBSD. We would like to obtain a feedback and contributions from young people in order to better understand the entry cost to the FreeBSD developers. We would like to learn, what first time users expect from the Operating System. GCIN offers an execellent form of introduction and evaluation to the Open Source world. By mentoring students, we hope to gain new and improved functionality as a result of submitted contributions. Third, by participating in GCIN we increase our exposure to young people within high-schools and secondary schools in general.
Please list the years your organization has participated in Google Summer of Code
2005-2011
What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for Google Code-in 2010-11. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.
The best general mailing list to discuss project ideas on is freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org. You may also receive useful feedback on area specific lists such as freebsd-doc@freebsd.org for documentation, freebsd-net@freebsd.org for networking, or freebsd-ports@freebsd.org for ports collection related projects.
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
#freebsd-soc
Please provide a link to your task ideas page. This is much like the ideas page for Google Summer of Code but must include at least 5 tasks in all of the 8 categories sorted by difficulty level.
Please tell us about how your organization has prepared for Google Code-in, including what (and how many) mentors and organization administrators have agreed to help, what your schedule and response time will be during the holidays (and otherwise during the contest period) and how you plan to deal with unresponsive mentors
We have a high-quality idea list with 44 tasks. We have 12 mentors assigned to the tasks. Most of the mentors are very active FreeBSD contributors, largely responsible for FreeBSD-related projects, like: The FreeBSD Documentation Project. We expect these people will be responsive in the expected 36-hour turn-around time, since this is how quickly they typically answer on a daily basis.
We expect response time over the winter holidays may grow up to 150% of this time. In case of mentor unavailability, support for the participants will be provided by other members of FreeBSD developers team over typical public channels, including freebsd-soc@ mailing list as well as #freebsd-soc IRC channel.