Google is going to help its summer interns with open-source tech at home

Thanks to Google’s open-source projects, thousands of interns will be joining Google from home, across 43 countries, for their summer internship program. This is the first time ever that Google’s internship programme is going to be held virtually with many projects focusing on open-source projects.

Google said that while many aspects of its internship programs will remain just as they have always been, the company will have to make certain adjustments. And the primary of these adjustments being that interns will not get to work next to experienced Googlers in a traditional office environment. And this can impact the kind of projects they work on, says Google.

So what does open source mean here? Open source is a model that makes a product’s underlying code available to everyone so it can be worked on. Interns will not have access to certain technical resources but they will still be able to work on projects.

Google has been contributing to open source for a while now with projects like Android and Chromium being two of its primary open source projects. Over that last twenty years Google has released thousands of open source projects and 2,600 of them are still active and being worked on.

Interns on Google’s summer internship will be contributing to projects like TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Istio, Chromium, Apache Beam and OSS-Fuzz. They will also be tackling the projects that support Covid-19 response efforts, including integrating Covid-19 data into the Data Commons and contributing to the Covid Severity project.