GSOC Mentor Summit

Lang and I spent the weekend at the Googleplex for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. We did some work on our source detection paper, and had a lot of conversations about open-source software. Things I learned of relevance to astronomers include: The Software Freedom Conservancy (and other organizations that are similar, like SPI) can provide a non-profit umbrella for your project, making it possible for you to raise money for your project as a non-profit organization. The commercial movie industry uses a lot of open-source computer vision and graphics (which is really physics) open-source software, even in blockbuster films (like Smurfs). The Climate Code Foundation is trying to do some of the things advocated in Weiner's white paper, but for climate science. The semantic web dream of many an astronomer (though not me; I am suspicious of all meta data) has been realized in the music space, in open-source projects like MusicBrainz.