Re: Google Summer of Code 2008

[Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org>]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2008 at 01:55:49AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

> Note that the whole "did last year projects were successful?" issue is
> secondary. Even if all of last years projects produced fabulous results
> that totally changed the way Debian is developed, I'm still not sure if
> we should use GSOC to pay current Debian contributors, instead of using
> it to bring in new contributors.

So you think it's better to focus on people who aren't sufficiently
motivated to get involved in Debian without being paid to do so?

> > >> I'm not saying that students that were DD did nothing of their time
> > >> during GSoc, but most of them produced results that were a bit
> > >> disappointing given what people could have expected from them, mainly
> > >> because they used their GSOC time to work on other Debian tasks.

> > Do you have any proof at all for that accusation? If so, please share
> > it. Otherwise, I think that people deserve apologies from you right
> > now.

> Do you have any proof that GSOC students worked 35-40 hours a week on
> their GSOC projects? You probably don't. So again, no real data to back
> either claim. We have different opinions, and have to live with it.

Where does this "35-40 hours" figure come from?

  10. How much time is required to participate as a student in Google Summer
  of Code?

  The amount of time you will need depends on both the scope of your project
  and the requirements of your mentoring organization. While your organization
  may offer some flexibility around milestone completion dates, you should
  expect your project to be your primary focus this summer. If you have a
  great internship starting soon or you're planning a month long backpacking
  trip, you likely won't be a good candidate for the program.

  http://code.google.com/soc/2008/faqs.html#0.1_student_time

I seem to be pointing to the GSoC FAQ a lot in this thread.  Have you read
it?  Is there some other documentation from Google that contradicts it?  I
certainly never got the impression that GSoC students were expected to treat
it as the equivalent of a full-time job.

> Also, I absolutely don't want to start looking in detail at the code
> produced by last years' projects, and evaluate how much development time
> was spent on them using the COCOMO model or something else, because it's
> only marginally relevant to my point (see above).

And only marginally relevant to Google's standards for participation in
GSoC, but you managed to turn this into slander against the people involved
all the same.

> OK, thank you for this clarification. To let everybody benefit from it,
> could you please mention in your next d-d-a mail about GSOC that
> everybody is welcomed as students, not just people not involved in
> Debian already? I know at least 2 people that could have applied as
> students last year, but didn't because they thought that GSOC wasn't for
> them since they were already involved in Free Software development.

  [...]
  While the majority of past student participants were enrolled in university
  Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs, GSoCers come from a wide
  variety of educational backgrounds, from computational biology to mining
  engineering. Many of our past participants had never participated in an
  open-source project before GSoC; others used the GSoC stipend as an
  opportunity to concentrate fully on their existing open source coding
  activities over the summer. Many of our "graduates" have later become
  program mentors.

  http://code.google.com/soc/2008/faqs.html#0.1_what_is



-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org