School is a fantastic place to learn, but what if industrial leaders introduce students to open source projects, with real problems to solve, and fantastic developers to work with? Google has found a pretty terrific way for the talented students geeks to spend their 2005 summer, with the help of 40 reknown open source, free software and technology-related groups. The project is called the Summer of Code.

Organizations like Apache and Samba and projects such as Nmap, Gaim and Internet2 took part in this program. Together with these partners, Google chose 400 finalists from 49 countries to take part - and this is from a pool of 8,744 applicants. Clearly there’s no shortage of talent. EVL student Xun Luo was one of the finalists who both got his proposal stood out among hundreds of other applicants and successfully completed his project, under the affiliation with Internet2.

The project Xun Luo worked on was TSC-I2, a micro-second precision timekeeping daemon that could be used in the transportation, measurement and management protocols for the next-generation internet. He was also awarded a $4,500 student grant and certificate of recognition for successfully completion of this project. TSC-I2 is open online at tsc-xluo.sourceforge.net.

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