Studio research assistant Brendan Howell will be spending his break participating in Google's "Summer of Code" Google describes SOC as "a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period."
According to Brendan "I applied and was accepted to work on the Gnome project which produces a free software desktop system for Linux. Specifically, I have been charged with updating and rewriting the Graphical Pipeline Editor application for GStreamer. GStreamer is a multi-media framework, much like Quicktime or Windows-Media, that runs on a variety of platforms including Linux, OSX and Windows."
You can follow Brendan's progress this summer on his development blog at http://gsteditor.wordpress.com/