It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted last. I’ve got quite a few posts I’ve been wanting to write, but I’ve been pretty insanely busy lately.

Aside from my new Wii (which I plan to post about again, later), my free time has been completely monopolized by my role as maintainer for GNU Wget. The main reason for my the upsurge in my activity related to this project, is that we’re participating in Google’s Summer of Code program this year.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Summer of Code (SoC or GSoC) program is an avenue whereby Google spends large chunks of money on fostering an interest in Free and Open Source Software among university student software developers. (See Google’s stated goals for GSoC.)

What happens is, a number of organizations and FOSS projects apply to join the program, and present lists of ideas for projects that students could take on during the summer. A number of students apply to join the program, and submit proposals for projects that they would like to do over the course of the summer. The organizations choose the project proposals they like best, and rank them in order of preference.

Google then decides how many students each organization will get, the organization communicates which students have the most interesting proposals, and—here’s the fun part—Google then pays each student a stipend of $4,500 to work full-time on the project over the summer. (The organization is also given $500 per project on which it has coached a student.)

I had been hearing of GSoC for some time, but had never really understood what it was. An interested student, however (Julien Buty), strongly encouraged me to participate in the program this year (as he wanted to apply for a project with Wget), and in fact got the ball rolling for me. I’m pleased to say that he wound up being accepted, and will now be paid by Google to work on Wget, to improve its handling of authentication over HTTP. One additional student was accepted, Saint Xavier, has also been accepted, and will be working on functionality related to internationalized domain names and web addresses.

This has brought in a real surge of developer interest in Wget, which is very welcome indeed. Up until now, the only active developer on Wget has been myself. Despite Wget being very ubiquitous in the Unix world, and used on millions of installations, it has recently had no real community to speak of. The mailing list has had only a handful of participants, and there are no active developers (sometimes to include myself—I have a day job, ya know!), only occasional patch submitters. But, even though we posted up our “ideas” page less than a week before the start of the student application process, we quickly began to see an influx of interested developers. In fact, along with GRUB, the GNU system bootloader, Wget proposals dominated the applications submitted for the GNU Project.

This ended up translating into a lot of work for me, though, because suddenly a lot of my time was being taken up responding to student questions, critiquing student proposals and giving advice on how to improve them.… Several projects needed to be specified in much greater detail before they could become a useful target for students to apply for, so I wound up spending a lot of time typing up rough specs, and discussing implementation approaches, as well.

While we were only able to choose two to participate through GSoC (which, in itself, was a happy surprise, as through most of the process we expected to get only one), several of the students whose proposals didn’t make the cut have continued on with the project anyway, because they’re interested in contributing and eager to learn and gain experience in the Free Software community.

An approximately equal number of contributors have also recently joined up outside of GSoC, thanks to Saint Xavier’s encouragement that I post a “help wanted” ad through GNU’s Savannah software development portal. I didn’t really think it’d grab much attention, especially as I knew that these ads were automatically closed after two weeks. Boy was I wrong! I got a new developer every day for the first four or five days after I posted.

Assuming it doesn’t fizzle out (it’s early to tell whether everyone will keep their enthusiasm for Wget over the long term), all this additional help means that I can actually realistically think about releasing version 1.12 before the end of the year, which otherwise would have been unlikely. I’m very excited about this, because there are a lot of features I’m going to be very happy to have. Julien and Saint Xavier are both working on pieces that are very high prorities for me for the 1.12 release, and I’m excited that updating Ted Mielczarek’s addition of CSS support to Wget was much easier than I’d hoped.

Perhaps soon, I’ll post an article that gives a better idea of what my pet project actually is, and why it’s so durn useful (as well as what its current shortcomings are, and what I hope to do in the future).