Google to help summer interns with open source tech at home

Thanks to the open source technology, thousands of young people will join Google from their homes in 43 countries for the summer internship as in-person classes and graduation ceremonies have been cancelled.

This is the first year when Google summer internship programme would be virtual and several technical internships would focus on open source projects.

Google said on Friday that although many aspects of the programme remain the same with interns working from home, the company had to make some adjustments.

"Interns won't have the benefit of working next to experienced Googlers in a traditional office environment, which in turn impacts the kinds of projects they can work on," the company said in a statement.

Open source is a model that makes a product's underlying code available for anyone to work on, so even though interns didn't have access to certain technical resources in a Google office, they could still contribute to meaningful projects.

Google has long been a big contributor to open source, and projects like Android and Chromium are now widely adopted around the world.

Over the last two decades, Google has released thousands of open source projects and nearly 2,600 are still active.

In addition to contributing to Google-created projects like TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Istio, Chromium, Apache Beam, and OSS-Fuzz, the interns will tackle projects to support Covid-19 response efforts, including integrating Covid-19 data into the Data Commons and contributing to the Covid Severity project.

Google said it has more than 1,000 technical interns actively contributing to open source projects.