Well I just had a really nice write-up regarding Google's Summer of Code Program, but I lost it do to buggy htmlarea javascript crashing my browser.
My main point was that it was a very smart move by google. On the surface its a benevolent outlay of 1 million dollars in stipends for students to help out Open Source projects. Underneath is an very smart campaign building up google's relationship with the Open Source community and future employees. A chance to find talent at high schools and Universities... a sort of real-time interview (note all code needs to be publicly available). A chance for Open Source projects to get new talent and some nagging tasks/feature requests done. A chance for students to have something meaningful to work on, and even be mentored by open source project representatives. Real work, real deadlines, real rewards in a non-threatening way.
But its a win-win for all parties really, the open source community, the students, and google. Smart. Marketing and PR can be used innovatively with some real value.
A university can learn from such a campaign.... IT departments should establish such a relationship with their Computer Science departments, for many of the same reasons.
