Google is giving support to open source project. Google summer of code support nmap, ubuntu, drupal, horde, asterisk, apache and MORE.

Together with these partners, we chose 400 students from 49 countries to take part – and this from a pool of 8,744 applicants, so clearly there’s no shortage of talent. We contributed nearly $2 million to this effort via $4,500 grants to each of the participants (and a $500 donation per student to the participating organizations).

Nmap’s lead developer, Fyodor Vaskovich, told us that Summer of Code developers “made major improvements to the Nmap Security Scanner, including a more powerful graphical interface and a next-generation remote operating system detection framework.” To that we say: excellent. Here’s a partial list of participants and projects, and we even threw together a map so people can see how global this program was.

Read full story from Google blog, posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager .