
Mozilla not accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015 - robin_reala
http://blog.queze.net/post/2015/03/03/Mozilla-not-accepted-for-Google-Summer-of-Code-2015
======
houshuang
I love Mozilla, but it would seem that they have a large enough budget to pay
for any student interns they want themselves? Happy to see this go to smaller,
less funded open source projects.

~~~
Manishearth
Intern has a different aura to it, many students find GSoC to be an easier
thing to try than an internship (plus, work from home!).

An "open summer of code" funded by Mozilla and other orgs themselves sounds
like an interesting idea (one that's being informally bounced around on IRC in
more than one place)

But yeah, I like that they're focusing on smaller projects.

~~~
Morpholemew
Not just informally; X.org has actually implemented this idea:
[http://www.x.org/wiki/XorgEVoC/](http://www.x.org/wiki/XorgEVoC/)

~~~
Manishearth
Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was talking in a Mozilla-specific POV. Thanks for
the link!

------
xiaq
I was planning to apply to a project under Mozilla and was very surprised too.
But I also fully respect Google's decision and let's not take their
sponsorship to the open source community as granted.

I also wish we could have an alternative SoC organized by a neutral
foundation, but it probably won't have as much extra revenue to spend on as
Google :)

~~~
justincormack
There is the European Space Agency's Summer of Code in Space [1]. Not as
general, but hey, space is fun!

[1] [http://sophia.estec.esa.int/socis/](http://sophia.estec.esa.int/socis/)

~~~
Manishearth
This is brilliant. As a physics student who also loves programming and open
source, I'm going to share this everywhere :D

~~~
jordigh
GNU Octave has done SoCiS a few times. And we prefer the synonym "free
software" for what we do instead of "open source".

If you're into maths and C++ and perhaps Matlab, look for us.

~~~
Manishearth
I like Octave. I'm a Mathematica user (sorry), but I've used Octave a bit and
found it pretty nice :)

~~~
jordigh
You don't have to apologise to me for using Mathematica. My professional goal
is to make sure that you will some day have no need for Mathematica, just like
you probably have no need for Internet Explorer in the face of Chrome or
Firefox.

If my goal hasn't been met yet, it is me who should apologise. I'll keep
working towards that goal.

------
daniel_solano
What is most interesting to me is the number of accepted organisations is down
significantly: from 190 last year to 137 this year, the lowest since 2007.
Naturally, the question that arises is 'Has Google cut funding for GSoC, or is
it adopting a significantly different strategy from what they have done the
past ten years?'

~~~
eropple
I haven't looked, but are each organization getting more or less slots than
before?

~~~
daniel_solano
We don't know, yet. That would be tell-tale if the number of students also
dropped significantly.

------
justincormack
Not sure why there was a decrease in the number of organisations, but for some
time they have been not accepting organizations that have been in regularly
before.

But there are a bunch of exciting new organizations - I am hoping to mentor
for the first time this year for Lowrisc, which is a new organization (in both
senses, GSoC and just started), see the projects here [1]

[1]
[http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/gsoc-2015-ideas/](http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/gsoc-2015-ideas/)

~~~
xiaq
If there really are a lot of new organizations, that confirms my theory on the
GSoC board: they are trying to encourage student developers getting into less-
loved open source projects. In comparison the big projects already get quite
some love (likely still not enough, but already a lot), so dropping them once
in a while is a reasonable tradeoff for helping out the smaller projects.

------
SixSigma
Plan 9 got refused too, the first time in 10 years,.just my luck now I finally
qualify as a student instead of a mentor.

~~~
zatkin
Is Plan 9 that operating system that Bell Labs (or Alcatel-Lucent) is
developing? I didn't realize they were pulling interns on-board.

~~~
SixSigma
Plan9 is an open source project since 2000

------
rburhum
There are several organizations with minimal funding (like OSGeo) that will
benefit from this. There are several infrastructure libraries under that
umbrella... A geospatial data abstraction library is not as sexy as an end-
user app with a GUI, but pretty much most of the reason of why you can open a
satellite image in your favorite desktop app (open source and proprietary) is
because of libraries like GDAL. A single student, for a summer, for a project
like that makes a difference. Thank you to the GSoC organizers for this!

------
cromwellian
The GWT Project didn't get accepted either. I'm not sure what process they
use, but we didn't get any favoritism despite >100k active monthly devs.

Perhaps they decided to promote orgs that were even more underserved?

~~~
hobarrera
Like github?

------
arthursilva
Kinda sad, but at least Postgres is in.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Disappointed ReactOS didn't get in this year, but at least Wine did.

------
deskamess
Not too surprising... their search engine is no longer the default in FF and
there are legal justifications not to support directly (FF) or indirectly
(YHOO) a competitor.

Could YHOO jump in with a similar program?

~~~
wongarsu
That's one possible explanation, but I think it's equally likely that they
thought some smaller project needed the help more than the already big Mozilla
Foundation.

Besides, so far I didn't get the impression that Google really sees FF as a
competitor (at this point in time). Google is not in the business of making
browsers, they make a browser because that happens to be the best way to steer
the future of the web. Mozilla seems to have similar views for that future and
together they are beating IE into submission.

~~~
bzbarsky
Mozilla is also not in the business of making browsers per se, fwiw; it's
making a browser because that happens to be the best way to steer the future
of the web. See the Mozilla Manifesto.

And while Google and Mozilla agree on some aspects of the web's future, there
are other parts (fingerprinting, tracking of users) on which there are pretty
fundamental disagreements.

------
quakershake
Hmm..competing browsers, phone platforms, javascript engines..I'm sure google
didn't take this into consideration. But yeah Mozilla is large enough to have
their own MSoC.

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cpeterso
Do the organizations submit specific projects with their GSoC application?
Perhaps Mozilla's proposed GSoC projects were deemed to be not worth funding,
not the organization itself. Here is a list of some GSoC projects that Mozilla
suggested for 2015:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community:SummerOfCode15](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community:SummerOfCode15)

------
ekaln
This is much bigger than just Mozilla:
[https://www.ostraining.com/blog/general/gsoc/](https://www.ostraining.com/blog/general/gsoc/)

Lots of big-name projects were dropped.

In total, over 130 projects were dropped and over 80 new projects added.

~~~
daniel_solano
Those lists aren't even close to being correct. For example, Clojure was
accepted last year and this year. syslog-ng, Python, and X.org were all
accepted this year.

~~~
rurban
Clojure yes. But not a single LISP. 3 ruby, but no perl, no Java, no
javascript core.

------
brudgers
Mozilla competes with Google in the web browser market and is moving into
mobile operating systems. Why would people expect Google to commit resources
toward helping them do those things?

~~~
kragniz
Don't assume this is something political. A lot of very good organizations
were not accepted this year, Mozilla being one of them.

~~~
brudgers
I'm not making political assumptions. I am assuming that businesses act to
protect their business interests and that assisting a competitor compete in
core markets is not in a company's interests.

I'd be happy to see a business case put forward for Google helping Mozzilla
develop a mobile operating system to compete with Android.

~~~
maxerickson
I doubt they run any of the GSOC decisions through any sort of business case
analysis. $150,000 is tiddlywinks to a corporation that generates billions on
a monthly tempo. Hand wavy good feels are plenty enough justification for that
level of spending.

(That's a ball park estimate of how much it would cost to fund and
administrate several projects)

~~~
brudgers
Your premise that Google contains enough business incompetence in enough of
the right places to fund a direct competitor explains why they have funded
Mozilla in the past. It doesn't really offer much explanation as to why Google
did not fund them this year.

Conversely, even the minimum business process of some VP looking at the list
and saying, "We are not going to fund a competitor," Occam Razors this year's
events.

~~~
sangnoir
Your premise, that the only possible reason to fund a competitor is
incompetence, on the other hand, strikes me as absurd.

If they weigh business cases at all, they might have considered the value of
goodwill they generate for funding competitors to outweigh any loss(es).

Aside: how does Google benefit from sponsoring Blender3D, in your immediate-
profit-driven opinion?

~~~
techpeace
I don't think anyone is claiming that they benefit from sponsoring non-
competitors, only that they would suffer a disadvantage from funding a
competitor, and that this MAY have weighed into their decision-making.

------
jms703
honeybadger. doesn't seem like the scope of gsoc.

------
middleclick
Linux Foundation and Tor Project were also not accepted.

~~~
jordigh
Nor GNU Octave, but this makes me kind of glad. We have enough donation money
to sponsor a student of our own. I think we might do it through the Outreach
Programme for Women.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Source_Software_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Source_Software_Outreach_Program_for_Women)

~~~
patzerhacker
>I think we might do it through the Outreach Programme for Women.

Because nothing says "I'm for gender equality" quite like a "boys not
allowed!" sign.

~~~
pygy_
Have you read the "Parable of the Polygons"[0]?

It completely changed my opinion about positive discrimination.

————

0\. [http://ncase.me/polygons/](http://ncase.me/polygons/)

~~~
patzerhacker
One person's positive discrimination is another person's negative
discrimination. Negative discrimination is seen by those its applied to as
punishment. In their mind punishing someone for something that they had no
hand in is a terrible technique to engineer a society and usually only leads
to a backlash.

Further, it's easy to model what society should look like and how it should
act by reducing it to mathematical models, but human behavior is not strictly
dominated by mathematics.

~~~
eropple
Personally speaking, as the kind of white guy who, nine years ago or so,
should have in theory been being negatively affected by programs like this, I
don't find a meaningful dose of negative discrimination in "dudes are welcomed
with hugs and handpounds pretty much everywhere, let's make sure there's a
place for women too." I respect your stance and your viewpoint, but I think
you're worrying about folks who don't need much worrying done on their behalf.
We dudes will be just fine without being the implicit focus of every place we
go.

~~~
patzerhacker
>I don't find a meaningful dose of negative discrimination in "dudes are
welcomed with hugs and handpounds pretty much everywhere, let's make sure
there's a place for women too."

Since things are the way that they are its wonderful that you feel that way.
Personally, it smacks as a bit sexist for organizations to say to me 'we
created this program to get women into things' because it reads to me like
them saying "we created this program to get women into things because they
can't hack it any way else". That's how minority outreach programs read to me
as a woman of color.

>I respect your stance and your viewpoint, but I think you're worrying about
folks who don't need much worrying done on their behalf.

If you've read my posts as "but what about the menz?!" (as I hear often) then
I'm afraid that it looks like you're being reductionist. My position on this
issue is both a combination of my lived experience having never felt
discrimination in the tech community while simultaneously watching several of
my equally qualified colleagues be denied opportunity through no fault of
their own because somebody thought I deserved a better shot so their
percentages looked better.

~~~
eropple
_> That's how minority outreach programs read to me as a woman of color._

I am 100% hearing you, and I understand how you get to that position. Here's
where my head's at: if, as a culture, we think that diversity of self,
thought, and action matter, then we have two options. One, which I think is
relying on the better angels of natures that haven't proven to _have_ them, is
a sea change of culture where the usual bullshit is not tolerated, the casual
sexism that I've heard (and objected to, and become the No Fun Guy for)
amongst just-us-guys is stamped out. The other is to facilitate a demographic
shift, to offer _early_ , supportive services (I mean, even internship
programs are fairly introductory). I tend to see these programs as doing the
latter towards a goal I find to be a net positive and, additionally,
beneficial to _me_ , in the long run. I understand the potentially problematic
nature of such programs and I think it's important for folks to keep those
potential issues in mind, but I disagree with you in calling these programs,
the ones that I am personally aware of, problematic in that way.

 _> If you've read my posts as "but what about the menz?!" (as I hear often)
then I'm afraid that it looks like you're being reductionist._

That wasn't my read, and "worrying" was flip, I apologize. Let me try again: I
come at solving social issues from an economic point of view; while it's not
zero-sum, something's got to give to get things moving and to make the
multipliers work. In the aggregate, I find it very unlikely that white dudes
are going to have problems finding opportunities. And so, I, personally, am
okay with making that trade and theoretically (but, I continue to think,
probably not really) causing low-level harm to a few folks in a privileged
position in the pursuit of a better end state for everyone.

And I respect that you haven't felt discrimination in the tech community. I'm
glad you've had better experiences than the folks I know, and whose
experiences have soured me on a lot of what I see as the insular nature of
tech. In particular I am thinking of two of my dearest friends, two of the
most level-headed people I know, who exited stage right because the trouble of
being a visible member of outgroups wasn't worth the benefits of working in
tech. That irks the shit out of me, and I want it to stop. (It's with this in
mind that I try to put into practice what I say, and a major red flag for me
is a homogeneous development group. I want to work with people unlike me,
because in the long run it's better for me, too.)

 _> several of my equally qualified colleagues be denied opportunity through
no fault of their own because somebody thought I deserved a better shot so
their percentages looked better_

Can I flip this around for a second? Because I don't think these feelings are
restricted to a single "side" of anything. I've seen candidates lose out
because they're not enough like the pack of white dudes doing the hiring
decisions, too, and I'm certain I've benefitted from those same things too.
You don't want to benefit unduly, and I respect that. But _neither do I_ , you
know?

~~~
eropple
Also, @patzerhacker, I'd be interested in talking about this offline if you're
up for it (there's no email in your profile). My user page has the usual ways
to get in touch.

------
teddyh
Google no longer supports Mozilla in any way.

~~~
nashashmi
So much for "Don't be evil." That motto's out the door.

But on the other hand, this might quite exciting. More companies will now
compete in the "don't be evil" space. And Mozilla can pick up the baton.

~~~
Karunamon
Apparently, not directly funding a direct competitor is now seen as "evil".

We're really letting the definition of that word slip, yknow? It used to be
you had to actually hurt people some way before that label could apply, now
I'm seeing it applied to the layout of UI elements on a screen.

~~~
hammerandtongs
Why exactly would google view mozilla as a business competitor?

~~~
bpicolo
Because they are in direct competition for a product generating hundreds of
millions of dollars a year?

------
CmonDev
On the upside there will be less of JavaScript-your-only-best-choice type of
pushing they are famous for.

~~~
techpeace
This comment confuses me. They're currently in the process of building a new
systems programming language ([http://www.rust-lang.org/](http://www.rust-
lang.org/)) with which to build the next version of Firefox.

