The Novell sponsored openSuse project has announced that it has 10 projects being funded through Google's Summer of Code 2008.

The annual event offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.

Google aims to inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development and to help open source projects identify and bring in new developers.

"I am very pleased that Google has chosen to provide us with 10 slots in the Summer of Code programme," said Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, community manager at openSuse.

"It is a great programme that allows community projects to develop new features or applications and, more important, to provide a way for new contributors to learn how to work with open source projects.

"We not only get valuable code, but we are able to work closely with the next generation of contributors."

Brockmeier claimed that interest was high as the openSuse project received more than 50 applications for its 10 allocated slots, and is confident that the students will be valuable contributors in the long run.

Google Summer of Code has funded more than 1,500 students and 2,000 mentors from 90 countries over the past three years. This year the project is funding 1,125 students with 175 open source projects.

The projects funded by Google are as follows: