Open Source

Google is a proud user and supporter of open source software and development methodologies. As a company, Google contributes back to the Open Source community in a variety of ways.

Source Code
From our performance tools to application layer projects like Google Gears, Google releases internally developed code as open source. We're pleased to make code developed by our engineers available and useful to a wider audience. We've also created many code samples to help developers get started using our APIs.

We provide funding to numerous open source organizations and academic researchers in support of their development work, including the Tesseract OCR library, and improvements to Wine and anti-phishing software to name just a few.

Googlers are also encouraged to contribute back modifications they make to publicly available source code, from Linux to Subversion to GCC and more. Many Googlers are active developers in external open source communities and have submitted patches to more than 200 open source projects.

Project Hosting on Google Code
Project Hosting on Google Code is a free service to the open source community. Featuring a Subversion back-end, wiki support, file downloads, issue tracking and a clean, Google-style interface, our project hosting service is the world's second largest open source hosting site after SourceForge.net.

Google Summer of Code
Now in its third year, Google Summer of Code is our program to introduce students to open source development and real-world programming challenges. Paired with a mentor from a particular open source project, such as the Python Software Foundation, successful student applicants spend twelve weeks working to complete a pre-arranged project plan. In return, students receive an immersive education in open source development, a financial stipend, certificate of completion, and most importantly a t-shirt. We've already seen over 800 students successfully complete the program and provided more than five million dollars in funding to open source through a combination of student stipends and donations to the participating open source organizations. By the end of Google Summer of Code 2007, we anticipate those figures will climb to over 1500 successful graduates and ten million dollars in funding.

Technical Learning
Through the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, we give everyone the opportunity to learn more about the achievements of the many open source contributors we employ. Past speakers have included Andrew Morton, Guido Van Rossum and Alex Martelli. All talks are made available on the web so the widest possible audience can benefit, and guests are welcome and encouraged to attend in person to meet our speakers.

Community Support
Through a yearly grant to Oregon State University's Open Source Lab, Google funds machines, power and bandwidth for the many open source projects that make use of OSUOSL's infrastructure. We also help to provide open source projects with free legal and financial management help through our donations to the Free Software Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation.

In addition to our trade and standards group participation, Google hosts a wide variety of community events, from monthly user group meetings to larger user conferences. We also sponsor various community conferences, meetups and hackathons to help support the collaborative development of our open source colleagues.