As summer approaches, so once more does Google's Summer of Code, a scheme set up by the company in 2005 to pay student programmers $5,000 to work on open source software. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now looking for student programmers to work on a selection of projects, with the funding coming from Google.

EFF has three projects: TOSBack, a site that tracks terms of service of sites around the world and notifies users when they're changed; Our Vote Live, a project to track voting problems in the US; and Switzerland, a system to test network neutrality.

In addition to these three, there is also an opportunity to work on TOR (The Onion Router), a system to bypass and evade Internet censorship. If none of these strike your fancy, there are 146 other projects accepted for this summer, so everyone should find something of interest.

Prospective developers should discuss their ideas with the sponsored projects over the next few days, prior to making an application for funding. The application period opens on March 29th, running to April 9th. The Summer of Code is a great opportunity to earn some cash and contribute to important open source projects.