This will be an unpopular opinion, but paying students to work on OSS seems entirely backwards, and sends a confusing message about open source. It makes no se

This will be an unpopular opinion, but paying students to work on OSS seems entirely backwards, and sends a confusing message about open source. It makes no sense for an experienced volunteer, contributing for free, to mentor a student being paid to contribute. I think a better system would be some kind of endorsement program, where Google donates money to projects and in return the projects agree to mentor one or more student contributors. At the end of the summer if everything works out, Google can endorse the student for the work they've done. The project gets something done, the extra cost of bureaucracy is covered by Google, and the student gets real world experience verified and endorsed by Google.