The strength of an Open Source FOSS project comes from its community. Google has realized that and supports the community with its Summer of Code programme. I had the chance to meet up at an earlybird breakfast in Brussels with Leslie Hawthorn and some folks from Google like Peter Anvin to discuss some ideas of how we can work together to support the Asian FOSS community. Leslie Hawthorn is the program manager for Google’s Open Source Team and responsible for the Summer of Code project of Google.
I am happy that Google likes our ideas about bringing the international FOSS community closer together. The LXDE team is engaging in bringing the global FOSS community together by supporting the community with tools in their language, organizing meetings of contributors and educating folks about open source and free software. Recently some core members including Andrew Lee and me also joined the organization team of the OpenTechSummit series and we have much more in mind.
With me at the meeting I had also invited my friend Felix Fietkau aka nbd, the number one OpenWRT developer and member of the Freifunk community. The OpenWRT guys are currently working on making LXDE run with their speedy distribution. It is fascinating to see what will come out of it.
Talking about the GSoC: Leslie told me that Google is very positive of our upcoming application for the Summer of Code 2009. We will suggest some ideas for students who are interested to participate in our wiki soon. As this is a wiki, you are of course invited to post your ideas: http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009
Mario Behling is a German born serial entrepreneur. He founded the lubuntu project, and as the co-founder of FOSSASIA he supports communities to develop open technologies for social change. Mario presently works on SUSI AI from his Singapore base.