2009 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

Google held the 2009 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit meeting Oct 24-25, 2009. Since many of the Haiku mentors were busy attending BeGeistert and others were tied up with other events like the Florida Linux Show, I ended up being the only Haiku mentor to attend this year. The weekend was filled with many sessions and lots of hallway time. I managed to meet many mentors from the other projects and many had heard of Haiku and many had even tried out the Alpha. I got a chance to meet with Sam Lantinga from SDL, who I had just sent patches for SDL and a few of the SDL libs in time for their recent SDL-1.2.14 release. I also talked with the guys from BRL-CAD and BZFlag who had already installed Haiku and were working on porting their stuff. I also talked with Bill Kendrick (TuxPaint) and David Bruce (Tux4Kids) and showed them TuxPaint running on Haiku. I talked with Joel Sherrill and Chris Johns from RTEMS and Matthew Dillion from DragonFlyBSD and they told me about a session they were putting together for Sunday. This session was held at the same time as a Distro session was going on, our session was a !Linux Meetup (http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Non-Linux_OS_Meetup). Mentors from 7 or 8 alternative Operating Systems and a couple from gcc, met for an hour and talked about ways that we could work together, we talked about drivers for most of that meeting. Out of that session was born the Rosetta-OS google group where we can continue talking (http://code.google.com/p/rosetta-os/).

I also got a chance to meet and talk with Alex Botero-Lowry, he’s working on porting emacs to Haiku, he was there with XMMS. Saw a few familiar faces of people we’ve met at shows, including David Maxwell with NetBSD (Coverity) and John Hawley from Etherboot. Met the guys from OSU Open Source Lab, they are hosting our Alpha images for us. I got to talk to lots of other people too, including guys from wxWidgets, Eclipse, Blender, Crystal Space, Git, Gcc, OpenOffice, OGRE, RockBox, OpenStreetMap, Pidgin, Python, SIP Communicator, Sugar Labs and Wine. I also got a chance to talk with Jennifer Redman from Systers, she’s a former BeOS user and has been keeping an eye on Haiku. All in all it was a fun weekend and met lots of people from many different projects and many different countries. Seeing that I’ve had interactions with a few via email it was cool to meet them in person. We were also given copies of the GSoC manual, which was written in under a week: http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoringGuide Some Related Links: http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Attendee_List_2009 http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/Session_Notes_2009 Photo of the Non-Linux Meetup: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewdillon/4045600268/