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On the 7th of August, the Thousand Parsec core developers congregated for the first time at the Googleplex. We arrived in Mountain View, CA from six locations around the world for a week long hackathon including coding, frivolity and fun!

The Thousand Parsec project was started in January 2002 and is a framework for creating a specific group of games, often called 4X games (from the main phases of gameplay that arise: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate). You might be familiar with some of the games that Thousand Parsec draws ideas from such as Reach for the Stars, Stars!, VGA Planets, Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations. The ultimate goal of Thousand Parsec is to allow multiple different 4X games be playable in a single client.

A primary focus of the week was to increase the playability of the “rulesets” (different game implementations). We spent plenty of time playing games, especially the Risk and Minisec games. While tempted to spend a week just playing games, we also fixed numerous bugs, cleaned up obsolete code, made lots of client improvements and reviewed Google Summer of Code students’ work.

By having many of the core developers in one location, changes could be made significantly quicker. An example is the new “Who is ready?” feature, which lets players know who is holding up the game and hence they are now able to guilt them into hurrying up! You can check out all the improvements that we made during the hack week by cloning out our latest git repositories and following setup instructions on our wiki.

Thousand Parsec still has a long way to go before it is as polished as the games which it draws ideas from, but hopefully with the continuing work by the contributors on line and in person at additional meetups, we have a bright future ahead.

Google Summer of Code was instrumental in making the hackfest happen. The event was primarily funded though the mentor payments, and the majority of the developers consisted of former Google Summer of Code students. Stay tuned to this blog for a wrap up of our 2010 Google Summer of Code student projects coming soon!

In the above photo you can see,

• Alan ‘alanp’ Laudicina (from Canada), a Google Summer of Code student in 2009, working on MTSec ruleset.
• Lee ‘llnz’ Begg (from New Zealand), project co-founder who wrote majority of the C++ Code.
• Kornel ‘Epyon’ Kisielewicz (from Poland), a Google Summer of Code student in 2009 and again this year. Working on refactoring the C++ server.
• Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell (me, from Australia), project founder who wrote the majority of the Python Code.
• Vincent ‘Iwanowitch’ Verhoeven, (from Belgium), a Google Summer of Code student in 2008, created our premier AI, daneel-ai.
• Eugene ‘jmtan’ Tan Jie Ming (from Singapore), a Google Summer of Code student in 2008, working on 3d client.

By Tim Ansell, Technical Solutions Engineering Team

For the past two weeks, we’ve been sharing Jeremy Allison’s video interviews from his trip to GUADEC. Today we have a third video where he talks to Lennart Poettering, creator of PulseAudio. Jeremy and Lennart talk about PulseAudio features, how Lennart got started improving audio on the linux desktop, and how to be successful in free software. Enjoy!

Thanks to Fabian Scherschel of Sixgun Productions for operating the camera.

Here at Google, we have engineers using Eclipse every day to build our external and internal products, as well as engineers building and releasing Eclipse tools. Earlier this year, we announced Eclipse Labs, which is “a single place where anyone can start and maintain their open source projects based on the Eclipse platform with just a few clicks.” Since we use Eclipse so much here at Google, hosting Eclipse Day at the Googleplex is one way of giving back to the community and providing an environment for Eclipse contributors and users to network and share ideas. We hosted Eclipse Day before in 2009 and 2008, and last week we hosted our third year where we tried out some new ideas: a brief lunchtime unconference and post-conference Ignite talks.

Ian Skerritt of the Eclipse Foundation wrote on his blog,

...Over 150 people attended the day long event that included 12 sessions related to Eclipse and Google technology. The presentations are now available online. There was lots of great information presented, like upcoming improvements to the Android SDK (based on Eclipse), Git support in Eclipse, a review of the Instantiations tools that Google just purchased and an introduction to the new Tools for Mobile Web project.

Most important, all of us at Google would like to thank Ian Skerrett and everyone at the Eclipse Foundation for assembling three of these great events. We were happy to welcome the Eclipse community to our campus, and we are happy to continue to support Eclipse. Don’t forget that we’re always looking to make this conference better, so give us your ideas! Tell us what you would like to see at future events in the comments, or if you were able to attend, tell us what you thought about this year’s program.

By Robert Konigsberg, Software Build Tools Team

(Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog)

Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we’re sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we've participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.

We understand that this may disappoint and inconvenience many of you, but we look forward to presenting at other venues soon. We’re proud to participate in the open source Java community, and look forward to finding additional ways to engage and contribute.

By
Joshua Bloch, Google Open Source Programs Office

At many open source conferences, discussions about diversity come up and there is a lot of talk about how to make the open source community more inclusive and welcoming. While the Open Source Programs Office’s Jeremy Allison was at GUADEC, he had a chance to talk to someone who is actively doing something to get more women involved in free software. Marina Zhurakhinskaya, GNOME Shell developer and Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, is an organizer of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women and she spoke to Jeremy on camera about the program’s activities.

On of the projects that the program has completed was a mentoring program similar to Google Summer of Code, which provided six women with mentors and stipends to help stimulate open source development. They plan to repeat their success again this year with the 2010 GNOME Outreach Program for Women, which will run from mid-December through mid-March to coincide with the Southern Hemisphere’s school break. If you’re interested in participating, take a look at the list of participating projects to see what sparks your interest, check out the mailing list, or help spread the word to anyone who you think should apply!

Thanks to Fabian Scherschel of Sixgun Productions for operating the camera.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

Freebase is an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured data that contains information about 12 million real-world entities including people, places, films, books, events, businesses, and almost any other thing you can imagine. Our graph database has about 400 million facts and connections between entities, and all of it is accessible via our REST API. Freebase was acquired by Google last month, and one thing we knew would happen was that Freebase would become “even more open.”

We first launched Acre, the hosted, server-side JavaScript platform behind Freebase Apps, just over a year ago. Since then it's become more and more important to us and to the Freebase community. Not only are all kinds of individual developers and businesses using Acre to build apps and integrate Freebase data into their own platforms, but we've also recently announced our intention to develop the Freebase.com site on the platform, too.

Until now, Acre development has always been tied to Freebase.com, meaning that you need to develop your Acre apps on our server, using our app editor. But we know that most software developers prefer to use their own native development environments -- their favourite text editor, version control system, and so on -- so lately we've been working on ways to make Acre work with source code that's not stored in Freebase.

Last week we announced that we're releasing the Acre platform as open source software. This means that you can run Acre on your own machine, pulling templates and other files from your local disk and using your own development environment. While Acre still has close ties to Freebase (such as API hooks for easily making Freebase queries), this also means that you'll be able to develop standalone, non-Freebase apps using the platform if you want. And, by running Acre on your own platform, you can avoid the resource limitations that are necessary in a shared environment.

If you're interested in server-side JavaScript platforms, you may also be interested in some of the technical details of Acre.

• Acre is based on Rhino, Mozilla's implementation of Javascript in Java. (In fact, "Acre" stands for "A Crash of Rhinos Evaluating.") Acre, by default, uses the Jetty servlet engine as its HTTP server, but can be run in any servlet container.
• Acre includes a module system that supports high-latency source retrieval using extensive caching. Although Acre was originally designed to fetch data only from Freebase itself, it can also fetch data from disk and will support a wider range of require() options such as WebDAV.
• Acre is capable of running on Google AppEngine, with support for the Keystore and for synchronous and asynchronous HTTP requests. Soon, Freebase's own Acre installation will run on AppEngine.

Please download Acre and try it out, and let us know what you think! You might also like to look at some of our other open source releases, like freebase-python (a Python library for working with the Freebase API) or freebase-suggest (a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to have your users select Freebase topics based on any criteria). For more information about Freebase and our open source efforts, see the Freebase wiki or post to the freebase-discuss mailing list.

By Kirrily Robert, Freebase Team

We’ve just finished our 6th year of Google Summer of Code™, our innovative program designed to introduce students at colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. Over 2000 mentors and over 1000 students from 69 countries began working together on over 150 open source software projects, and we're happy to announce that 89% of our student participants have received passing final evaluations, which is about 4% better than 2009. This is our best success rate to date.

These successful students are now preparing code samples to present to the rest of the world; we'll post an update here when the source code produced during this year's Google Summer of Code has been made available on project hosting on Google Code. Of course, there's no need to wait for code samples - you can check out their work by visiting the websites and mailing lists of the participating projects now. We'll also be publishing more extensive statistics from our program evaluations, along with wrap up reports from some of our participating mentoring organizations, so stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

Congratulations to all of our students for their hard work this summer. We hope you will continue working with your project communities with source code, documentation, and enthusiasm long after this summer has ended. Many thanks also to our community of mentors whose time, skill and dedication make this program possible.

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Jeremy Allison, co-founder of Samba and member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, recently returned from GUADEC, the GNOME conference held in The Hague, Netherlands. Jeremy was kind enough to bring his video camera along with him so he could interview some open source community notables and share the recordings here on this blog.

Jeremy’s first interview is with Bradley Kuhn, who is a board member of the Free Software Foundation, the president of Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Policy Analyst and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center. Jeremy and Bradley discuss the GPLv3 and Bradley’s work as an advocate of free and open source software.



By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

Rob Pike, Google Distinguished Engineer and co-creator of the Go programming language, presented an OSCON keynote last month about his motivations for creating Go. For those of you who weren’t able to catch Rob in person, you can now watch the video of his talk.



If you’ve been curious about an open source programming language that offers, in the Go team’s words, “the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++,” check out the video and then get Going!

by Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

My name is Marcos Paulino Roriz Junior, and I’m participating in Google Summer of Code™ for the first time this year. I’m really excited because I’ve been developing in Java for some time and this is my first step into FOSS. My project is hacking on GNU Classpath on Escher which is an X11 client written in Java, used by the XPeer code to request and handle drawings. I’m learning the X11 protocol which is amazingly cool and surely ahead of it’s time. This is not only helping me with Google Summer of Code but is also the main protocol behind thew idea that I’m using in my final year project.

When I applied to Google Summer of Code I had no idea how it was going to change my life. So far I have not only learned new things, but also met awesome developers. The climax of this was when I joined several other Brazillian students to ask Google for some financial help so that we could travel to FISL (Forum Internacional de Software Livre – International Free Software Forum) in Brazil. Google did an amazing favor and helped us so that we could learn about and spread free software to others. I met with several other students from the #gsoc-br IRC channel, met excellent FOSS developers, and gave a lecture about the Google Summer of Code experience.

At that talk I met more Google Summer of Code students, we shared our difficulties and we exchanged tips on how to solve problems. They all laughed a me when I said that I preferred svn over dscm, like git or mercurial. But at the same time they gave me a very brief and informal talk/introduction to git (which I’m kinda liking). I talked also a lot about X and XCB with friends and hackers there since it’s directly related to my proposal.


I had a chance to meet some seriously cool developers (like Jon “Maddog” Hall) and attend amazing talks (like Glassfish in OSGi Bundles and What’s New on OpenJDK 7). Overall, It was a amazing experience, and I want to thank again Google, all the cool people at FISL and my mentor Mario Torre, who understands that I’m a little behind on my project but getting back to the schedule now =).

By Marcos Roriz, 2010 Google Summer of Code Student