Comment by jordigh
5 years ago
Google's Summer of Code was a little annoying too. You'd get this wave of Indians, where GSoC is extremely popular, asking you what they could do for you if they knew some C++. It was a lot of work to deal with their applications and shepherd them along a project and it usually yielded little in the end. We wanted new contributors, but at best we'd get a sort of working idea over a summer.
I know for some other projects GSoC worked out well. I'm sure people will pipe up telling us how we're doing it wrong if we couldn't get good results from GsoC candidates, but after a couple of years I was tired of being involved with it and got cynical about it.
WRT GSoC We're constantly tweaking the program to make it more relevant and less time wasting for projects. Early on, we got people doing extremely negative things to 'succeed' in the summer of code.
It's reasonable to bow out if it's not working for your project. Maybe check us out every few years to see if we've addressed your problem :-)
Oh, Octave is still doing GSoC. I just haven't been involved with it in a while. I guess it's still working for someone else, glad to hear it's gotten better.
I'm sorry it didn't work out for you. For you, was a "good result" just a good project, or a contributor with continued involvement?
Coming from the other side, as someone who was a GSoC student, but whose involvement with open source ultimately dropped off over the years, I think one of the problems here is the timing. GSoC students are typically in their third or fourth years of undergraduate study, which are followed by internships and on-campus data structures & algorithms interviews which require a lot of preparation. Then for the first couple of years in the industry, most haven't sorted out their work life balance sufficiently to want to code in their free time. It's only recently (2-3 years after I graduated) that I started feeling like I had enough time to get back into open source.
The fact that there as many Indians applying as there are, I think is due to a combination of the factors that 1. there are a lot of Indian CS undergrads 2. internships are extremely competitive, so GSoC is perceived to be an alternative (which it really is not)