For anyone interested in or associated with the project/mentorship side of this, watch this presentation from the most recent linux.conf.au: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydS4vXNzN0I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydS4vXNzN0I</a><p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>It was awesome.<p>What was I working on? Printing under linux.<p>Perhaps the very definition of not-sexy. Which is just fine by me since that leaves tons of unsolved challenges.<p>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."!<p>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.<p>I am very thankful for GSoC, and I think my new co-contributer, and former mentor, is as well.
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!).
This looks great! I have a couple of questions!<p>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?"<p>I wasn't able to find a link for what the actual application will entail. Where can I find that?<p>Any tips, thoughts, or advice for people who have previously administered or mentored a project - particularly for small groups?