41–50 of 66 posts
The first thing that comes to mind is pay a stipend to the project and the student. So if the student gets $6K and 99.99% of them skip town at the end of summer no further contact, the project gets nothing but unmaintained code and wasted effort. However... what if the project ALSO got $6K of cold hard cash? Or credit for google services, adwords, donated hardware, who knows...
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 tak…
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.
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For a working dev who occasionally uses OpenBSD, is passionate about the project & its goals and wants to contribute, how would you suggest I start? I tried keeping up with the mailing lists for a while, but I found it difficult.
Read the porting handbook and work on updating ports of software you're interested in. That's an easy way to get your hands dirty quickly. You can learn a lot about how OpenBSD works and you can work with upstream projects to make their software port more easily to OpenBSD.
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As a former student I would like to emphasize that it is not about the money. I would have worked on the same project in the summer even if I was not getting paid. There can be various reasons why students won't return or become permanent contributors. For example in my case being a double major in very distant disciplines I do not have the time to contribute when school is on. Then summer I will be working on my the…
Having been on the receiving side of GSoC students, I'd say 90% of them come from poor countries and are looking for the money. I've seen some that weren't students at all and seemed to be working for "consulting" companies already.
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I think in OpenBSD's case it was that, plus the fact that they got essentially zero code that was anywhere near their standards, or any devs willing to commit longer-term to improve it. If the results had been better, more mentors/devs would have been willing to step up. GSOC promotes dumps of low to mid quality code that then goes unmaintained. After all its focused on relatively junior programmers doing it for a ni…
How exactly is OpenBSD planning on getting more coders that can code to their standards if they aren't willing to teach anybody? NIH + an unwillingness to let anyone else into the house seems like an excellent way for a project to find itself facing the brink should 1 or 2 core developers leave the project for any reason. >without an eye to maintainability that later rots in tree and makes everyone else's job worse.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in OpenBSD's case it was that, plus the fact that they got essentially zero code that was anywhere near their standards, or any devs willing to commit longer-term to improve it. If the results had been better, more mentors/devs would have been willing to step up. GSOC promotes dumps of low to mid quality code that then goes unmaintained. After all its focused on relatively junior programmers doing it for a ni…
How exactly is OpenBSD planning on getting more coders that can code to their standards if they aren't willing to teach anybody? NIH + an unwillingness to let anyone else into the house seems like an excellent way for a project to find itself facing the brink should 1 or 2 core developers leave the project for any reason. >without an eye to maintainability that later rots in tree and makes everyone else's job worse.…
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 tak…
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 befor…
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.
Anyone interested in brainstorming how to make GSOC work, as it apparently doesn't? The first thing that comes to mind is pay a stipend to the project and the student. So if the student gets $6K and 99.99% of them skip town at the end of summer no further contact, the project gets nothing but unmaintained code and wasted effort. However... what if the project ALSO got $6K of cold hard cash? Or credit for google servi…
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.
Anyone interested in brainstorming how to make GSOC work, as it apparently doesn't? The first thing that comes to mind is pay a stipend to the project and the student. So if the student gets $6K and 99.99% of them skip town at the end of summer no further contact, the project gets nothing but unmaintained code and wasted effort. However... what if the project ALSO got $6K of cold hard cash? Or credit for google servi…
IIRC, the student gets half the payment on completion of the first half of the project, and half after the second, both on the condition of positive reviews from the org. So if a student just blows it off, they don't get their payment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For this particular open source project GSoC brings no advantage to the table (yes, it may be great for other projects). OpenBSD does not need GSoC to attract contributors. The project gets a good amount of new contributors on a regular basis, and they get onboarded quickly without causing much distraction, if any. The mentor/student relationship is atypical for open source projects which are used to operating as a c…
As a former GSoC mentor, I think it's important to have an onboarding pipeline in your project, and disagree with the notion that the mentor/student relationship is somehow atypical - such relationships pop up all the time in the natural course of projects, and are key to the health of most of them. It's up to you to select the students who you think will stick around. Given that, taking the time to onboard junior pe…
In a normal situation, new contributors show up and are self-motivated, and receive guidance from others so that over time they become equals. The mentor's role is spread among several people, and it is informal and temporary. There is no money involved.
Many (not all!) GSoC students do not experience what the normal situation in open source feels like.
I am happy that your student is an open source enthusiast and got a job in open source. That is great.
I have seen this kind of good experience, but also more disappointing ones. In one case, a student simply disappeared after the first payment (in the middle of the summer) had been issued.