Soft Challenge

May 22, 2008 (LBO) – Search engine giant Google has accepted 24 student projects from Sri Lanka's University of Moratuwa, for an open-source software development competition, the highest from any university in the world, officials said. The universities 24 acceptances for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme, beat 10 projects from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland and the University of Campinas Brazil, eight from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

It was also ahead of the seven submissions from the University of Toronto, University of Michigan in USA, Carleton University Canada and Budapest University of Technology Hungary and six submissions from University of Warsaw Poland.

"The competition and academic training helps to create more job makers than seekers," Malik Ranasinghe vice chancellor university of Moratuwa told reporters.

Out of the 24 chosen projects 16 were from the computer science and engineering department while the other six projects were from the faculty of engineering and the faculty of information technology.

The students at the university have mainly chosen Apache Software Foundation's projects for the GSoC, Hiranya Jayatilake a student repre