Broaching from classics like Okular, KStars and digiKam, to new arrivals such as Drawy, Mankala, and keepSecret, we look forward to a productive summer with, lots of learning and lots of commits.
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Wouldn’t the time be better spent avoiding anything Google, Mirsoft, etc…. and concentrate on open source software developers?
How do you mean? These are open source developers. Mostly budding open source developers.
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I’m sure not for long once Google is involved for any length of time.
That is like everything. At some point the Universe itself will succumb to heat death. This will probably complicate running our mentorship programs, but we’ll figure it out.
Meanwhile…
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This is exactly what the program is for.k
Experienced developers from various FOSS communities taking some of their time to coach students in becoming contributors themselves.
Sometimes the student is already an established contributor and takes this opportunity to concentrate full time on a specific task set for a couple of weeks.
However, in a lot of cases the students are new to the communities, likely even new to contributing to FOSS.
KDE has been a mentoring organisation since the very beginning, with many participants still active developers, often now mentors themselves.
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Would there be a viable way of achieving all these (totally worthy) goals without it being enmeshed with Google?
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Sure and this happens all the time when people approach KDE on their own.
We also run a somewhat related program called Season of KDE.
Summer of Code is just an additional opportunity
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To add to @krake’s comments, it is not like Google interferes with any of the projects. They provide financial backing and send merch to the participants and that is about it. They have a very hands-off approach to the whole thing.
Which suits us fine. We fill in a form or two, and then manage the projects at our leisure.
If you want to know why they do that and why they seem to not intervene in the FLOSS projects they fund, think of it like this: imagine they had to pay a bunch of developers to work on crazy stuff in the hopes they would someday come up with something profitable.
For a fraction of what that would cost, they can just throw the loose change the find down the side of Sergey Brin’s sofa at open source projects as sponsors and also fund GSoC once a year.
It is a bit like the infinite monkeys on typewriters thought experiment: some dev in some FLOSS project somewhere is bound to come up with something interesting at some point. All they have to do when that happens is grab it and incorporate whatever it is into their own tech or product line.
If you don’t believe me, just look up the story of KHTML.
We are their cheap R&D.
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The names look ubiquitously southern-Asia to me (myself not from the area so might be wrong). Curious if it is the case.
Due to global movement patterns over the last century it has become increasingly unreliable to determine a persons location by just name.
Especially when a name’s origin is from regions that can be more populous than a small continent elsewhere.
For GSoC there can be additionally skewing factors like alignment of (or the lack there of) university periods.
For example, when I’ve mentored a number of students for KDE between 2005 and 2015, the time lines did not quite fit well for European students as May/June tend to be very busy university periods for them.
Of course the mentoring project can accommodate for this to some extend but it does deter applications from such regions.