The Google Summer of Code is an annual program first held during the summer of 2005, its a program that helps student developers to create new open source programs.

Google has been working with a variety of open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects.

Last year, Google had a great success in this event, Google was criticized for not giving sufficient time to open source despite these criticisms 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations from 49 countries participated including FreeBSD, Ubuntu Linux, Blender and Google itself. This year they are planning to include even more organizations and participants.

Reference :
>> Summer of Code website