Google has announced the Summer of Code, whereby students who spend their summer working on certain open source projects can earn up to $4,500.

The details are pretty cool. They're funding 200 developers, all students, to execute on plans to complete open source projects for a number of open source programs.

The students will receive a $500 check when they are approved and the remaining $4,000 when their project is completed. Each project must be published under an approved open source license and loaded on one of the many open source sites (such as SourceForge).