[Ksummit-2008-discuss] Fixing the Kernel Janitors project

[Jiri Kosina]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Grant Grundler wrote:

> > On the other side, I know that universities (in their computer-science 
> > oriented study programmes, of course) have often problems with not 
> > having enough interesting projects for "Operating systems" kind of 
> > classes; even coming up with topics for master theses could sometimes 
> > be painful for them, if there are more students than creative ideas 
> > for work topics.
> I was told the Master's thesis needs to involve some theoretical work 
> and not just a coding exercise. 

That really depends on the university indeed. And, to be frank, I think 
that you can do "theoretical work" around any non-trivial coding if you 
want to. You can create fancy graphs and statistical data showing how much 
you improved certain algorithms/specific workloads, you can do some 
sophisticated comparisons of your algorithm to other implementations out 
there, etc.

I don't see a big issue here, really.

> Subsystem maintainers can register as "mentors" for Google Summer Of 
> Code and equivalent programs at other companies. AFAIK, universities are 
> targeted for promoting those projects. Unfortunately, 2008 SoC is 
> already off and running but should keep it in mind for next year. 
> Perhaps Linux Foundation could be the focal point to help organize this 
> for linux kernel in 2009.

As James already said (and I agree with that), SoC projects are usually 
too small to work as large university projects/master theses.

Also, I am not sure what could serve as bigger motivation for people to 
finish the projects -- one-shot money being paid by Google, or receiving 
master of science degree? :)

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs