
Google Summer of Code 2012 is on - buddhika
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/02/google-summer-of-code-2012-is-on.html
======
JoshTriplett
For anyone interested in or associated with the project/mentorship side of
this, watch this presentation from the most recent linux.conf.au:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydS4vXNzN0I>

Summary: if you think of this purely in terms of getting contributions to your
FOSS project, and in particular if you think about the amount of time spent
mentoring versus the amount of time needed for a developer to write the code
themselves, you're doing it wrong. It exists primarily to provide mentorship
so that we'll have more FOSS developers in the future, and from that
perspective it works awesomely, whether or not any individual project gets
lucky and gets a pile of useful code.

------
alpb
This is a great organization. I've been a gsoc student 2 years ago and learned
a lot from my project and earned a decent wage. Google pays hundreds of
thousands of dollars for Open Source contributions done by these students.

~~~
thedigitalengel
I think the total budget is of the order of several million dollars.

~~~
cookiecaper
It's worth noting that GSOC has become really expansive in the last couple of
years, approving 988 projects last year alone. While that kind of
expansiveness is great, I don't think it should be held as a prerequisite --
even if companies only did 10 or 20 sponsorships like this every summer it
would have a really good impact.

~~~
wicker
Those sponsorships exist already -- they're called internships.

What would be great would be a FOSS-only list of internships and push for a
change where a remote internship was more common, which I think is more what
you're getting at with how GSOC differs from existing options.

~~~
tikhonj
The biggest difference is that GSOC does not support Google directly. Plenty
of the projects Google supports this way are not even useful to them at all:
for example, a silly 3D game I used to play was part of the program for three
years. Internships are great, and there are some open source companies that
have really neat ones (Mozilla comes to mind), but most small projects run by
volunteers can't afford to pay for an intern themselves.

------
thedigitalengel
This is the best -- I've literally built my software engineering career
pivoting off this program.

------
cookiecaper
I love GSOC and I really, really wish that more companies would do something
similar. It is a GREAT way to get much-needed improvements in open-source
software, teach a student some real, in-the-trenches skills that will be used
throughout his career (and hopefully kicking off a meaningful career in OSS
and diverting from the dark path of corporate .NET/Java jockey), and get an
amazing amount of development value per dollar.

The real question is, "why is Google the only company that does something like
this?" Though it doesn't fit exactly the same way I could even see a similar
mentorship program as part of Y Combinator or other startup incubators.
There's really no excuse for companies like Red Hat, Yahoo, Canonical and
others that are heavily dependent on OSS not to do this.

~~~
wicker
I completely agree with you on the merits of the program. Why don't more
companies do it on the scale of GSOC? Organizing it must take multiple full-
time people. It'd be great to see more programs where students get paid for
their work but I want to point out that it's not the only way companies and
students are both benefiting from collaboration.

I'm at Portland State and we've got a solid six-month capstone program in
computer science where local companies, including several in open source, are
working with student teams. I know electrical/computer has a similar program
with a more hardware focus. It's not that GSOC is the only program where
companies work with students, only the most visible.

~~~
tikhonj
Except for GSOC, the students aren't working for Google at all: they're just
working on _random_ open source projects and get a stipend from Google for it.
This is very different from a company--even an open source one--working with
students directly.

------
Danieru
Last year I got to spend the entire summer rewriting 10K+ LOC of C into 2k loc
of Perl(with increased performance!) and adding support for sqlite backends.

It was awesome.

What was I working on? Printing under linux.

Perhaps the very definition of not-sexy. Which is just fine by me since that
leaves tons of unsolved challenges.

Before I would never have had the courage to contribute to a linux sub-system.
Who am I to bug true unix hackers with inane questions like: "How do I build
our package?" or "I'm sorry I made a mess of our changelog."!

GSoC solved this barrier. How? Because I knew I would be able to put in the
time to learn the domain and be useful. And in turn they knew I would be
around long enough to justify the inane questions.

I am very thankful for GSoC, and I think my new co-contributer, and former
mentor, is as well.

------
rileya
This is an awesome program. I did it last year, and having it on my otherwise
empty resume really helped in the internship hunt this year (I don't know if
they used my GSoC evaluations or anything during the process, but I ended up
landing a Google internship!).

~~~
cbo
Echoing rileya, GSoC was the shimmering star on my resume when I applied for
my first internship two summers ago.

Mine wasn't at Google, but at a startup that decided to keep me on and just
got acquired, so it all worked out pretty well!

------
memset
This looks great! I have a couple of questions!

I am considering applying as a mentor for an open-source project I maintain.
The project - an Android app - has 30,000+ users, but the development team is
basically me and a handful of folks who have submitted patches or are willing
to mentor. Is this too "small-potatoes?"

I wasn't able to find a link for what the actual application will entail.
Where can I find that?

Any tips, thoughts, or advice for people who have previously administered or
mentored a project - particularly for small groups?

~~~
LockeWatts
I have no idea about how GSoC process or mentoring works, but I just wanted to
say as a potential GSoC student it sounds like a cool project, and I hope that
things like that are out there, whether yours or someone else's.

