Results

The Google Summer of Code is now over. I've had the pleasure of being a mentor for Codehaus. More specifically I've mentored the following projects:

• JBoss 3.x and 4.x support in Cargo. This project was successfully implemented by Nyoman Winardi (a.k.a. Win). Win started sending patches and over the course of the programme Win became a committer proper. The full support of JBoss 3.x and 4.x will be available in the next release of Cargo (version 0.7).
• JSR-88 support for Cargo. This project was successfully implemented by Lev Olkhovich who also became a Cargo committer. Lev implemented deployment of J2EE archives using JSR-88. In the process he started a conversation to refactor Cargo to support the notion of remote containers. There's still some refactoring going on and we need to add some more tests but we should be able to have support for remote containers and JSR-88 in Cargo 0.7.
• Refactor Cactus to use Cargo. One more project revolving around Cargo! This one was implemented by Xuan Thang Nguyen. Xuan sent several patches and thanks to Felipe we've applied some of those. However, I have to admit I have personally not been available enough to fully help Xuan apply his patches. We still have some patches in JIRA that haven't been applied yet. Actually the plan was to have Nicolas Chalumeau to help Xuan and apply Xuan's patches. Nicolas has been working and helping on Cactus for a long time now and was voted a committer on Cactus at the beginning of the SOC programme. However, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is extremely slow when it comes to adding a committer to a project (it can take more than 2 months) and we've not been able to give right access to Nicolas. Thus he's not been able to apply his own patches nor Xuan's... This is really an issue that the ASF has to solve quickly lest it'll see people leaving to create their project somewhere else.
• Faqbot project. There were 2 students on this project: Jie Tang and Harsh Puri. Harsh has had to resign from the programme because of the tragic flooding that happened in the region of Mumbai. Jie has continued alone and has done some good work. Unfortunately he's not been able to fully complete the project (which was probably the most ambitious of all the SOC projects I've mentored). The hardest part was probably starting a project from scratch. Everything had to be done. Hopefully Jie and others will continue the project and make it release-ready. I was very excited by this project and I still am.
• Real-time collaboration editing (Oxyd). This one was implemented by Jeremi Joslin of XWiki fame. Even though it was a project started from scratch Jeremi was able to complete it and have a first usable release ready. Well done Jeremi!

Learnings

• Open source is about collaboration with others. I don't think the SOC emphasis was enough on this point. For example it was "fordbidden" for students to work together and the main focus was to produce a working piece of software.
• Open source is not bound by time. People do it in their free time (at least most people) and as such they can't be expected to be bothered by strong release pressure. The SOC students had to work on a given date which caused some friction as the students were not always aligned with the project's timeline. Let me give you one example; It happened that some student needed to do a refactoring to the existing code to progress. This needs to be reviewed and possibly voted by project committer. There could easily be a delay of 1 week before we get everyone's agreement/ideas, etc. In the meantime the student is under pressure to quickly progress.
• I have taken too many students. I felt I did not do the best possible job when it came to mentoring them. Some were not autonomous enough and would have required more mentoring. I'll take fewer students next time. The hardest is really to mentor students on a new open source project started from scratch. As I'm already involved with several open source project, I did not have enough bandwidth to help on all aspects required to set up a new project.
• Several students had not enough time to participate. Some were still passing exams, others had some other summer job. This, combined with the deadline and the nature of open source did not mix well together. I think students should have an open source project to complete on a much longer timescale (possibly with milestones to monitor progress). This would also help in having them really integrated into an open source team. In addition it'll show their real commitment over time which is really what "professional" open source is about. There's nothing worse that someone who contributes big portion of code and then leaves some time after. Then, all the bug fixing and maintenance falls on the shoulders of the committers who were not the ones with the itch in the first place...

Parting words

The SOC was good. It has boosted the open source community quite remarkably (even though it has also probably put some strain on it...). Out of all the students I've mentored I think 2 or 3 of them (out of 6 initially) will continue to work on the open source project they've participated to. That's a 30%-50% ratio and I'm very happy about it. Thanks Google for making this happen!