'I'm a total geek all around', says Angela Byron, a 27-year-old computer programmer who has just graduated from Nova Scotia Community College. And yet, like many other students, she 'never had the confidence' to approach any of the various open-source software communities on the internet—distributed teams of volunteers who collaborate to build software that is then made freely available. But thanks to Google, the world's most popular search engine and one of the biggest proponents of open-source software, Ms Byron spent the summer contributing code to Drupal, an open-source project that automates the management of websites. 'It's awesome', she says. Ms Byron is one of 419 students (out of 8,744 who applied) who were accepted for Google's 'summer of code'. While it sounds like a hyper-nerdy summer camp, the students neither went to Google's campus in Mountain View, California, nor to wherever their mentors at the 41 participating open-source projects happened to be located. Instead, Google acted as a matchmaker and sponsor. Each of the participating open-source projects received $500 for every student it took on and each student received $4,500 ($500 right away, and $4,000 on completion of their work). Oh, and a T-shirt. All of this is the idea of Chris DiBona, Google's open-source boss, who was brainstorming with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, last year. They realised that a lot of programming talent goes to waste every summer because students take summer jobs flipping burgers to make money, and let their coding skills degrade. 'We want to make it better for students in the summer', says Mr. DiBona, adding that it also helps the open- source community and thus, indirectly, Google, which uses lots of open-source software behind the scenes. Plus, says Mr. DiBona, 'it does become an opportunity for recruiting'. Elliot Cohen, a student at Berkeley, spent his summer writing a 'Bayesian network toolbox' for Python, an open-source programming language. 'I'm a pretty big fan of Google', he says. He has an interview scheduled with Microsoft, but 'Google is the only big company that I would work at', he says. And if that doesn't work out, he now knows people in the open-source community, 'and it's a lot less intimidating'. Ms Byron's comment on her own summer experiment is ______.