It didn't work out for OpenBSD. I wouldn't generalize so quickly. Mentoring students does take work, some do try and game the system. That happens no matter if

It didn't work out for OpenBSD. I wouldn't generalize so quickly. Mentoring students does take work, some do try and game the system. That happens no matter if GSoC or not. With GSoC, you basically have a form of financial support for hiring students. The GSoC paperwork is also rather minimal. If you can, going through local universities and colleges is also a great way to have students work on community-driven Free Software projects. On a project, we had 4 engineering students do the equivalent of an internship on our community mesh network project. They did really great work and it's nice to have ties with university communities. We also had profs in social science classes inviting us to give talks, or had networking workshops during the weekends.