Haiku at VALS' Semester of Code

The Haiku project is participating in this year’s “Semester of Code” (SoC) of the European VALS project. The SoC is similar to Google’s GSoC, but without the financial incentive and more emphasis on the educational side.

Its goal is to connect higher education students with open source projects to introduce them to the cooperative nature of working within a group on a bigger project. For Haiku, besides potentially extending its feature set, it’s another opportunity to spark the interest of new, eager developers with a chance to gain future regular contributors.

These are the Haiku coding projects interested students can apply for:

• Add subtitle support to the Media Kit

• Create an XFS file system driver

• Extend USB Stack

• Implement suspend to RAM, and/or suspend to disk

• Modify the app_server to support compositing

• Reduce power consumption

• Streaming support for Media Kit and applications

• Unify file system caches

• x86-64: Support for 32 bit userland

The students will be mentored by Axel, Jessica and Adrien.

Being funded by the European Union, only European students are eligible to apply. There’s a list of involved universities that will be partners of the SoC programme in the future. Though, as this is the “pilot” year of the programme, students don’t seem to be restricted to those institutions (at least this is how I read the flyer (PDF)).

This is the timeline:

• September 17 - November 14: Student applications
• November 28: Announcing the participating students and their projects
• November 14 - December 1: Community bonding
• December 1 - April 30: Student coding

There isn't a fixed project deadline. The details will be negotiated between mentors, students and academic supervisors for every project individually.