Are we having GSOC on 2026?

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In the 2026 have Google summer of code ? on nixos org?

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We didn’t apply last year as nobody was there to manage the process: GSoC 2025 - Deadline 11 Feb - #4 by tomberek

Going forward we have a new NixOS Foundation board (which I’m part of) which should stay on top of this and do the application next year. So I’m gonna guess that yes, we will have GSoC in 2026, assuming we get accepted then :slight_smile:

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Google Summer of Code Organization Applications open Jan 19, End Feb 3. I was thinking the SBOM package names identifier improvement effort would be good. Some people to write tooling to make it better, some people to manually correct where the heuristic is wrong. Some tooling to build CI. Seems plausible. I’m willing to be a mentor/organizer if we can get a few of you or others interested in running a GSoC. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

Any other ideas? Hydra? SBOM/PURL improvements, Dyn Derivations? We can work on reducing issue/PR count. We can work on security automation.

Ideas? Anyone interested in organizing? Mentoring? Participating?

Edit: adding the link to roles: What is Google Summer of Code? | Google Summer of Code Guides

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I‘d mentor measurable improvements to the CVE-derivation matching algorithm for tracker.security.nixos.org.

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Unfortunately I had thoughts of contributing, but according to google you need to be 18 years of age to register for anything and I still got a year and a bit before I am 18. :sob:

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I am applying on behalf of the NixOS org for GSoC. We don’t yet need concrete project ideas, but I do need a co-organizer. Anyone interested?

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@tomberek Please don’t do this without coordinating with the foundation board, since we’ll have to process the legal and financial matters. We also already have an account as the NixOS foundation there and just need to sign it up for 2026 which is on the agenda for this week :wink:

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I’m interested in helping out as well!

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Anyone have some project ideas and proposals for Google Summer of Code? Throw them (even if in raw form) in a reply or into GitHub or here.

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A few ideas:

  • Adding a mechanism to get vendored dependencies from any package for any ecosystem (such as rust, dart, etc)
  • Adding a mechanism to get more information out of patches
  • Patch cleanup effort to get ones that fix a CVE to actually reference the CVE’s right
  • Better meta on whether the package is a wrapper of an existing package (plus making sure unwrapped is an attribute)
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Not sure if it’s doable within GSoC, but would like pitch these:

  1. Semantic versioning. Coz current package versions depends on the flake’s inputs. And changing a particular packages’ version is something like giving another nixpkgs input for it and using it.

We could use something like nixhub.io ‘s work for the hashes and versions relation.

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Add bells and whistles to tracker.security.nixos.org:

  • Improve matching quality with more structured data and heuristics
  • Workflow for change proposals by maintainers
  • Sharing evaluation data across multiple services
  • Assorted things that might be interesting for students or young professionals to work with on a productive system:
    • Increasing data storage efficiency
    • Fixing UI problems
    • Digging into the data to increase transparency or observability
    • Introducing new tools or paradigms into the development process
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In my opinion, in the coming years software development and adoption will be largely driven by open source, AI, and security. NixOS is an excellent solution for the first two aspects; however, it still lacks security features compared to other common operating systems, whether immutable or not.

So I would suggest anything that can improve NixOS security. Good starting points could be:

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Application for GSoC 2026 has been submitted (thanks @Infinisil and @roberth !) Please PR subsequent ideas to GSoC/ideas/2026.md at 25dbb7395ff295921e082483bd85e090ad62b5f3 · NixOS/GSoC · GitHub using the format and guidance linked to in the READMEs.

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