"Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. We look forward to welcoming more new contributors and projects this year," begins a page listing all the projects planning to participate in this year's GSoC. Among the numerous planned participtants there are many kernel projects, including DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Git, GNU/Hurd, Linux, Minix, and NetBSD.

Student applications for GSoC projects begin today, running through the end of the month. Read on for many of the participation announcements from the above projects. For more information about the GSoC, the program's FAQ explains:

"Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year."