I think it's a grand idea.

Although I'd rather not admit it, though, I was too immature when I was at university to actually perform any meaningful work on something like an open source project.

In fact I didn't become mildly useful at programming until about a year into my first professional job.

But still, when Google go out and sponser open source development you have to agree this is a great thing for the world in general! I love it! I'm a big fan of progressing the world as a whole, not just a monopoly organisation at a time.

And university students are bound to be influenced most by 4500USD type sums of money, as opposed to some of us professional programmers which would clear that in a month.