4 ms·

I'm a GSoC org admin for a few years now. To be honest, the bureaucracy that comes with GSoC is really negligible from my point of view. The application form is

by mhils 10y ago

I'm a GSoC org admin for a few years now. To be honest, the bureaucracy that comes with GSoC is really negligible from my point of view. The application form is fairly short, the evaluations during the summer are literally done in five minutes... there really isn't that much overhead. The part that takes a lot of time for us is mentoring students. You'll very likely invest more time into the student than it would take you to write everything yourself (which also would be more fun). Unfortunately, some students don't stick around, but if everything works out, you'll get fantastic long-term contributors (we did). The upfront investment on the mentor' side may not be everyone's cup of tea (and that's ok), but I think it's unfair to attribute that to bureaucracy. GSoC may just not be a good fit for OpenBSD in that regard.

kuschku 10y ago
Even if you have students that are already contributing to your project, and just want to allow them to do so full-time during the summer, GSoC is often not worth it. You need all the mentors available, although they won’t be used, and while the code will be of good quality and kept, the bureaucracy is too much. One project I (I’m a student with too much free time) am contributing to has discussed entering GSoC before, but we don’t have the manpower to provide the required mentors.
- derf_ 10y ago
  > Even if you have students that are already contributing to your project, and just want to allow them to do so full-time during the summer, GSoC is often not worth it. Having an already-existing contributor sign up for GSoC actually backfired on us. He had to come up with a "project" rather than the minor, drive-by contributions he'd been making (a project which he probably wasn't that excited about, to be honest). He then got behind and didn't finish, and then I guess was embarrassed, as we never heard from him again. So we lost a useful contributor.
sverige 10y ago
"it was too much effort on the part of the foundation organizers mentors to deal with the bureaucracy involved, and we didn't really see enough return in terms of new developers to the project" I don't think Bob's statement is a criticism of the bureaucracy itself, but rather that the amount of time spent on the GSoC project as a whole is better spent doing other things that need doing on the OpenBSD project. He explicitly says so shortly after the above quote. I'm not sure why this is even an issue to be discussed. Are people here trying to figure out what GSoC could do better so that projects like OpenBSD might find it worthwhile to participate? Or is the purpose to criticize OpenBSD, or Bob Beck individually, or both, for daring to say publicly that they have better ways to spend their time and effort than participating in GSoC? Clarity on those questions would be helpful in determining whether it's worth talking about. Incidentally, the thought I had when I saw this on the list is that if the person who originally posted the question on misc@ really wants to contribute to OpenBSD, he can begin the way other contributors begin without GSoC: port a favorite app that's not already available to OpenBSD, test patches that the devs post and provide meaningful feedback, propose a patch that provides a solution to some problem you have run into while using OpenBSD, etc. I think OpenBSD offers a great environment for real mentoring while maintaining their high standards for correctness and security. Sure, a student doesn't get paid any stipend to do it, but what they can learn in the process of contributing something that has long-lasting value to a project with OpenBSD's standards will surely pay off in career development in other ways. If OTOH they need money to pay the rent over the summer or to burnish their resume for their application to Google, apparently they'll be better off contributing to another project that has the resources to participate in GSoC.
- hermitdev 10y ago
  From what I read, they applied 2 years in a row, and nothing happened. From the link it's not really clear what happened. > we didn't really see enough return in terms of new developers to the project. It's not clear in just this context what the author means. Were they looking to add significant numbers of full-time contributors? If so, I don't really think that's what GSoC is about. Isn't GSoC geared towards smaller projects that can nominally be completed in a student's summer break? I mean, seems to me that expectations on the 2 sides are different: OpenBSD was looking to recruit full-time (I don't mean full-time in the 40-hours a week sense, but rather year-round part-time contributors) vs GSoC looking to fund individual efforts on OSS projects for 3-4 months during summer break. Am I misunderstanding?
  - stsp 10y ago
    Your impression that nothing ever happened does not align with the facts. The project applied 2 years in a row, and mentored several students. Some developers mentored more than one student. https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbsdfoundation https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbs... https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbsd_foundation https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbs...

by mhils 10y ago

kuschku 10y ago

Even if you have students that are already contributing to your project, and just want to allow them to do so full-time during the summer, GSoC is often not worth it. You need all the mentors available, although they won’t be used, and while the code will be of good quality and kept, the bureaucracy is too much. One project I (I’m a student with too much free time) am contributing to has discussed entering GSoC before, but we don’t have the manpower to provide the required mentors.

derf_ 10y ago
> Even if you have students that are already contributing to your project, and just want to allow them to do so full-time during the summer, GSoC is often not worth it. Having an already-existing contributor sign up for GSoC actually backfired on us. He had to come up with a "project" rather than the minor, drive-by contributions he'd been making (a project which he probably wasn't that excited about, to be honest). He then got behind and didn't finish, and then I guess was embarrassed, as we never heard from him again. So we lost a useful contributor.

sverige 10y ago

"it was too much effort on the part of the foundation organizers mentors to deal with the bureaucracy involved, and we didn't really see enough return in terms of new developers to the project" I don't think Bob's statement is a criticism of the bureaucracy itself, but rather that the amount of time spent on the GSoC project as a whole is better spent doing other things that need doing on the OpenBSD project. He explicitly says so shortly after the above quote. I'm not sure why this is even an issue to be discussed. Are people here trying to figure out what GSoC could do better so that projects like OpenBSD might find it worthwhile to participate? Or is the purpose to criticize OpenBSD, or Bob Beck individually, or both, for daring to say publicly that they have better ways to spend their time and effort than participating in GSoC? Clarity on those questions would be helpful in determining whether it's worth talking about. Incidentally, the thought I had when I saw this on the list is that if the person who originally posted the question on misc@ really wants to contribute to OpenBSD, he can begin the way other contributors begin without GSoC: port a favorite app that's not already available to OpenBSD, test patches that the devs post and provide meaningful feedback, propose a patch that provides a solution to some problem you have run into while using OpenBSD, etc. I think OpenBSD offers a great environment for real mentoring while maintaining their high standards for correctness and security. Sure, a student doesn't get paid any stipend to do it, but what they can learn in the process of contributing something that has long-lasting value to a project with OpenBSD's standards will surely pay off in career development in other ways. If OTOH they need money to pay the rent over the summer or to burnish their resume for their application to Google, apparently they'll be better off contributing to another project that has the resources to participate in GSoC.

hermitdev 10y ago
From what I read, they applied 2 years in a row, and nothing happened. From the link it's not really clear what happened. > we didn't really see enough return in terms of new developers to the project. It's not clear in just this context what the author means. Were they looking to add significant numbers of full-time contributors? If so, I don't really think that's what GSoC is about. Isn't GSoC geared towards smaller projects that can nominally be completed in a student's summer break? I mean, seems to me that expectations on the 2 sides are different: OpenBSD was looking to recruit full-time (I don't mean full-time in the 40-hours a week sense, but rather year-round part-time contributors) vs GSoC looking to fund individual efforts on OSS projects for 3-4 months during summer break. Am I misunderstanding?
- stsp 10y ago
  Your impression that nothing ever happened does not align with the facts. The project applied 2 years in a row, and mentored several students. Some developers mentored more than one student. https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbsdfoundation https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbs... https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbsd_foundation https://www.google-melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbs...