
Why Isn’t OpenBSD in Google Summer of Code 2017? - alecsx6
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=149119308705465&w=2
======
mhils
I'm a GSoC org admin for a few years now. To be honest, the bureaucracy that
comes with GSoC is really negligible from my point of view. The application
form is fairly short, the evaluations during the summer are literally done in
five minutes... there really isn't that much overhead.

The part that takes a lot of time for us is mentoring students. You'll very
likely invest more time into the student than it would take you to write
everything yourself (which also would be more fun). Unfortunately, some
students don't stick around, but if everything works out, you'll get fantastic
long-term contributors (we did). The upfront investment on the mentor' side
may not be everyone's cup of tea (and that's ok), but I think it's unfair to
attribute that to bureaucracy. GSoC may just not be a good fit for OpenBSD in
that regard.

~~~
sverige
"it was too much effort on the part of the foundation organizers mentors to
deal with the bureaucracy involved, and we didn't really see enough return in
terms of new developers to the project"

I don't think Bob's statement is a criticism of the bureaucracy itself, but
rather that the amount of time spent on the GSoC project as a whole is better
spent doing other things that need doing on the OpenBSD project. He explicitly
says so shortly after the above quote.

I'm not sure why this is even an issue to be discussed. Are people here trying
to figure out what GSoC could do better so that projects like OpenBSD might
find it worthwhile to participate? Or is the purpose to criticize OpenBSD, or
Bob Beck individually, or both, for daring to say publicly that they have
better ways to spend their time and effort than participating in GSoC? Clarity
on those questions would be helpful in determining whether it's worth talking
about.

Incidentally, the thought I had when I saw this on the list is that if the
person who originally posted the question on misc@ really wants to contribute
to OpenBSD, he can begin the way other contributors begin without GSoC: port a
favorite app that's not already available to OpenBSD, test patches that the
devs post and provide meaningful feedback, propose a patch that provides a
solution to some problem you have run into while using OpenBSD, etc.

I think OpenBSD offers a great environment for real mentoring while
maintaining their high standards for correctness and security. Sure, a student
doesn't get paid any stipend to do it, but what they can learn in the process
of contributing something that has long-lasting value to a project with
OpenBSD's standards will surely pay off in career development in other ways.

If OTOH they need money to pay the rent over the summer or to burnish their
resume for their application to Google, apparently they'll be better off
contributing to another project that has the resources to participate in GSoC.

~~~
hermitdev
From what I read, they applied 2 years in a row, and nothing happened. From
the link it's not really clear what happened.

> we didn't really see enough return in terms of new developers to the
> project.

It's not clear in just this context what the author means. Were they looking
to add significant numbers of full-time contributors? If so, I don't really
think that's what GSoC is about. Isn't GSoC geared towards smaller projects
that can nominally be completed in a student's summer break?

I mean, seems to me that expectations on the 2 sides are different: OpenBSD
was looking to recruit full-time (I don't mean full-time in the 40-hours a
week sense, but rather year-round part-time contributors) vs GSoC looking to
fund individual efforts on OSS projects for 3-4 months during summer break.

Am I misunderstanding?

~~~
stsp
Your impression that nothing ever happened does not align with the facts.

The project applied 2 years in a row, and mentored several students. Some
developers mentored more than one student.

[https://www.google-
melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbs...](https://www.google-
melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbsdfoundation) [https://www.google-
melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbs...](https://www.google-
melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbsd_foundation)

------
d33
I guess that's a sign of a really unhealthy community if they have no process
of getting hackers into their system so that they can get productive within 15
weeks.

I really don't buy the "too much bureaucracy" argument. Google is really
transparent in terms of GSoC and I would say they're really well managed. I
read that as a sign of OpenBSD's weakness, not Google's.

~~~
stsp
For this particular open source project GSoC brings no advantage to the table
(yes, it may be great for other projects).

OpenBSD does not need GSoC to attract contributors. The project gets a good
amount of new contributors on a regular basis, and they get onboarded quickly
without causing much distraction, if any.

The mentor/student relationship is atypical for open source projects which are
used to operating as a community of equal peers. Mentoring students who expect
to be mentored takes a lot of time, and the vast majority of them don't come
back. In my experience money is a key incentive for students in GSoC and that
makes it hard to keep them as volunteers. Unless you are very lucky as a
mentor and pick a student who turns out to be an open source enthusiast, they
won't actually care about your project in the long term. And there is no way
of knowing that during the application process. Unless in special cases where
you already know the student, as I did in one instance, but that's an
exception.

(Speaking as an OpenBSD dev, and as a former mentor of several GSoC students,
over several years, at the Apache Software Foundation).

~~~
reachtarunhere
As a former student I would like to emphasize that it is not about the money.
I would have worked on the same project in the summer even if I was not
getting paid. There can be various reasons why students won't return or become
permanent contributors. For example in my case being a double major in very
distant disciplines I do not have the time to contribute when school is on.
Then summer I will be working on my thesis at another university which again
would leave me little time to make any significant contributions. I am still
trying my best to help new people by reviewing requests and making small
changes that don't take too much of my time. I plan (hopefully) to get back to
contributing on weekends once I am done with school.

For a few friends I have found internships being another reason why they did
not go back to their orgs. 5k$ seems like a big amount but it really isn't
(even in India!)

Finally, one last reason I can think of is terrible mentors. I have been
really lucky to have amazing mentors but I have heard a few horror stories
from others.

~~~
tcrews
Having been on the receiving side of GSoC students, I'd say 90% of them come
from poor countries and are looking for the money. I've seen some that weren't
students at all and seemed to be working for "consulting" companies already.

~~~
reachtarunhere
Can't really comment on this as I know no such people. The "consulting"
companies part is hard to believe given the rules for GSoC. The new payment
adjustment taking into account PPP is a welcome move in this regard even
though I don't agree on the numbers they have decided.

------
pkd
I don't know exactly how big the OpenBSD volunteer team is but I think it must
be substantially larger than most open source projects because of their user
base. This is a weak argument to not participate in GSoC. There are multiple
projects with a much smaller volunteer base than OpenBSD who participate in
GSoC.

At the same time I do recognize that the effort involved for mentoring someone
is huge and the actual payout is not much for the mentor (it was $500 the time
I participated).

I think it is viable to see GSoC as a platform through which you can reward
your existing student contributors as well - ask them apply through GSoC and
they can get paid for their contributions. This eliminates the effort involved
in onboarding new contributors and also provides a nice reward for the
existing contributors.

~~~
4ad
> This is a weak argument to not participate in GSoC

Hey, at least have the courage and in integrity to tell them directly how to
run their project. On the mailing list. Not here.

Open source drive-by project management is one of the most fascinating (and
sad) phenomenon to me. How can people who have no association with some other
group of individuals have the audacity to tell them how to spend their time
and how to run their project. It's bewildering.

~~~
pkd
I guess I wasn't very clear in my comment. I don't use OpenBSD, I don't
subscribe to their mailing list and I am not a contributor. Hence, it will be
nonsensical of me to go and criticize their decisions there.

Also I can't tell if you are directing the last part of your comment towards
me or towards Google, but I certainly respect their decision to not
participate. They participated previously and decided that the payout in terms
of new contributors wasn't worth it (and I agree with them there) - at the
same time there is a second angle to look at GSoC from and that is what I
pointed out in the last part of my comment.

------
reality_czech
An open source project I am involved with had the same experience. We were
expecting to get idealistic young people as students who had a passion for the
project. Instead, we got people from poor countries who were doing it for the
money and didn't care about the project at all. I understand that this money
may do some good and I don't blame the students for going for it, but it
really tainted the whole process in my mind.

GSoC also has this this weird master/slave (or if you like, employer/employee)
dynamic that is very artificial. If you are a mentor, you are basically a
manager for the student. You have to give status reports, feedback, evaluate
how they are doing, decide whether to pass or fail them at the end, and so
forth. It's very different from how a real open source project operates. If
you want to know what being a middle manager operating an outsourced project
feels like, then being a GSoC mentor is for you. If that is something you
would run screaming from, then I would stay away.

------
SadWebDeveloper
IMHO GSoC should be something like "hacktoberfest" where contributors for the
projects get paid for squashing bugs not for making "new features" nobody
needs.

~~~
protomyth
That would be an interesting project. Have projects submit a list of bugs they
would like some help with and then pay the selected students for each bug
fixed (maybe with a base stipend). Probably teach quite a bit about the daily
grind of software development.

~~~
pwnna
Google CodeIn is what you're looking for, although this is for pre-university
students:

[https://developers.google.com/open-
source/gci/](https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/)

~~~
protomyth
Nice project, but a version with college students would probably work better.

~~~
0x6c6f6c
At that point it seems like a glorified version of a bug bounty list[1].

The convenience of GSoC is that the students get to intern with pay on open
source projects. If squashing bugs is the only goal, then going through their
bug bounty lists and getting paid for it really is just picking a company on
that list and doing it yourself. However, with a Google program behind it and
the company's agreement, I'm sure the amount paid will be higher and/or more
consistent.

Including my old link [2] for security/bug vulnerability discovery as well,
since you get paid for these by the companies based on bug fixes or
discoveries.

[1]([https://www.bountysource.com/bounties/search](https://www.bountysource.com/bounties/search))

[2]([https://bugcrowd.com/list-of-bug-bounty-
programs](https://bugcrowd.com/list-of-bug-bounty-programs))

~~~
SadWebDeveloper
The value of "mentorship" or "internship" at FOSS projects are overrated, most
of this projects run without clear goals and improvements are made only by
"interested parties" like intel wanting their technologies to run better on
Linux or the devs at GitHub optimizing "Git" for the sake of their business
operations but yet not a single improvement on the UI side (obviously because
it will hurt their business if suddenly people realize how easy could be using
Git without GitHub).

------
protomyth
Is there some statistics out there for number of students whose code is still
used and/or are now developers/contributors on the project the did GSoC for?

------
samueloph
On the other hand, i was discussing a gsoc project on Debian since last year
(was very excited about it), and guess what, Debian was not accepted as a gsoc
organization for this year, nice...

edit-> i'm a student and gsoc's stipend would help me a lot.

~~~
Gracana
I don't know what the timeline for GSoC is so maybe it's too late, but Haiku
(BeOS-inspired/compatible open source OS <www.haiku-os.org>) was accepted
again this year and might be of interest to you.

~~~
i80and
+1 to working with Haiku. I submitted some patches, and they're a friendly and
welcoming developer community.

------
VLM
Anyone interested in brainstorming how to make GSOC work, as it apparently
doesn't?

The first thing that comes to mind is pay a stipend to the project and the
student. So if the student gets $6K and 99.99% of them skip town at the end of
summer no further contact, the project gets nothing but unmaintained code and
wasted effort. However... what if the project ALSO got $6K of cold hard cash?
Or credit for google services, adwords, donated hardware, who knows...

~~~
mgbmtl
It didn't work out for OpenBSD. I wouldn't generalize so quickly.

Mentoring students does take work, some do try and game the system. That
happens no matter if GSoC or not. With GSoC, you basically have a form of
financial support for hiring students. The GSoC paperwork is also rather
minimal.

If you can, going through local universities and colleges is also a great way
to have students work on community-driven Free Software projects. On a
project, we had 4 engineering students do the equivalent of an internship on
our community mesh network project. They did really great work and it's nice
to have ties with university communities. We also had profs in social science
classes inviting us to give talks, or had networking workshops during the
weekends.

------
vog
This is sad.

It means that Google Summer of Code imposes too much bureaucracy onto Free
Software projects. In other words, GSoC is only viable for those projects
whohave enough spare volunteers to begin with.

~~~
throwaway2048
I think in OpenBSD's case it was that, plus the fact that they got essentially
zero code that was anywhere near their standards, or any devs willing to
commit longer-term to improve it. If the results had been better, more
mentors/devs would have been willing to step up.

GSOC promotes dumps of low to mid quality code that then goes unmaintained.
After all its focused on relatively junior programmers doing it for a nice
stipend as part of their school experience for a summer (or so).

GSOC is just a bad fit for the sort of quality and maintainership OpenBSD
demands from its codebase and contributors. They have had a lot of years of
experience with academic code mostly written as a proof of concept without an
eye to maintainability that later rots in tree and makes everyone else's job
worse.

~~~
tw04
How exactly is OpenBSD planning on getting more coders that can code to their
standards if they aren't willing to teach anybody? NIH + an unwillingness to
let anyone else into the house seems like an excellent way for a project to
find itself facing the brink should 1 or 2 core developers leave the project
for any reason.

>without an eye to maintainability that later rots in tree and makes everyone
else's job worse.

...that's the whole point of the mentors. IF that's what OpenBSD is getting
out of GSoC, it's the mentor(s) fault, not GSoCs.

~~~
throwaway2048
They were willing to mentor people via GSoC, nobody stuck around (almost all
the applicants do it for the money, rather than an interest in volenteering),
ergo its not worth their time. Even in organizations that have a high priority
towards onboarding new devs, GSoC retention rates are typically very low.

They have no issues attracting devs via other channels.

------
Beltiras
Even if the current contributions are slim, wouldn't the long term benefit of
perhaps gaining a permanent contributor outweigh the current effort to educate
more people?

~~~
mrweasel
I think it depends on how slim, the mentors have to take out time from their
own projects, so you'd have to detract that from the gain. You'd also have to
factor in maintenance on new code produced by GSoC students that don't stick
around.

Honestly I don't get why people are upset, the explanation from Bob seems
completely reasonable. If the OpenBSD developers don't believe that they see
sufficient result from their work, then nobody is forcing them to participate.

~~~
Beltiras
It sounds sad and short sighted to me. Maybe they are turning away volunteers
because interest is so high. That would be a rare Open Source project.

