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What's "documented need"? Hosting costs for the project? Room & board for the summer? College tuition? I might not be considered to have "need." I'd live in my

What's "documented need"? Hosting costs for the project? Room & board for the summer? College tuition? I might not be considered to have "need." I'd live in my parents' house if I were to do this. I have to pay a good portion of my Stanford tuition somehow or another, but I could see you determing that that's not "need." (And if it is need, then >95% of your applicants will have at last $5k of tuition to pay for the year, so everyone will have need.) Regardless of whether I "need" the money, spending an entire summer hacking full-time has some serious opportunity cost. I could get a real job (and make >$5k). I could hang out with my friends every day. Do you really expect college students, most of whom have little money, to line up to forgo ~$10k of income (roughly the amount you can make at a programming internship, varying wildly of course) so they can do an open source project? Sure, it would probably be more fun; it would be have completely flexible hours; you might not end up quite having to work full-time on it. But still. I'm a lot more likely to do it if I at least get a good portion of the compensation I could get from working. And even if you do find people to do it, the quality of people will be a lot worse. For the most part, you'll get the people who don't have an opportunity cost of $10k because they're not good enough at programming to land a good job over the summer. So you'd probably just end up wasting a lot of the mentors' time because you'd have to accept lower-quality people. The money helps you be selective and hopefully get some truly high quality projects out of it.

petercooper 17y ago
Do you really expect college students, most of whom have little money, to line up to forgo ~$10k of income (roughly the amount you can make at a programming internship, varying wildly of course) so they can do an open source project? People should go where they can get the most overall value. Getting $10K for an in-the-flesh internship at a development shop is easily better value than $5K from the GSOC program for most people. People who are good for open source are attracted to it naturally. They care about more than money. That's my whole point really.. that the best people in open source aren't motivated by cash, so why attract people who are?
- jackowayed 17y ago
  Sure. And I'm not saying there are people who love OSS who will give up OSS altogether because they can't or won't do SOC for free. They'd still hack OSS on the side, but they wouldn't do SOC. There's lots of college students that really need to bring in some money over the summer so they can afford their tuition. Plenty are already taking out loans as it is. Think of it like the YC money--it's not all that much, lots of the companies don't really need it, it generally isn't the main attraction, but some great people absolutely need it to participate, so giving it ensures that no one will have to turn the opportunity down because of money

petercooper 17y ago

Do you really expect college students, most of whom have little money, to line up to forgo ~$10k of income (roughly the amount you can make at a programming internship, varying wildly of course) so they can do an open source project? People should go where they can get the most overall value. Getting $10K for an in-the-flesh internship at a development shop is easily better value than $5K from the GSOC program for most people. People who are good for open source are attracted to it naturally. They care about more than money. That's my whole point really.. that the best people in open source aren't motivated by cash, so why attract people who are?

jackowayed 17y ago
Sure. And I'm not saying there are people who love OSS who will give up OSS altogether because they can't or won't do SOC for free. They'd still hack OSS on the side, but they wouldn't do SOC. There's lots of college students that really need to bring in some money over the summer so they can afford their tuition. Plenty are already taking out loans as it is. Think of it like the YC money--it's not all that much, lots of the companies don't really need it, it generally isn't the main attraction, but some great people absolutely need it to participate, so giving it ensures that no one will have to turn the opportunity down because of money