Google announced March 23 that it is now accepting student applications to participate in its Google Summer of Code program.  

Google officials said the company will be accepting student applications to participate in the Summer of Code program from March 23 through April 3.

In a March 23 blog post, Leslie Hawthorn, a program manager on the open-source team at Google, said:

Google Summer of Code, our program to introduce students to open source software development, is now in full swing for 2009. Over the past four years, we've paired nearly 2,500 "graduates" with more than 2,500 mentors from industry to academia, with some spectacular results: millions of lines of source code produced and over $15M in funding provided to open source development. This year student participants have more than 150 open source software and technology–related projects to choose from when submitting their applications, from operating systems to content management systems.