[zeromq-dev] Google Summer of Code 2014

[Bjorn Reese]

On 12/31/2013 03:19 AM, Pieter Hintjens wrote:

> It is a delicate process to decide what problems are really worth
> solving. Throwing money into the process when that money isn't backed
> by business needs is IMO counterproductive.

This is a general argument that is not specific to GSoC.

If you cannot conceive of any GSoC projects that will support any
business needs, then you can consider it an opportunity to prototype
some ideas.

> If Google was using ZeroMQ and contributing patches, that would be
> awesome. Would they however pay *students* to make patches to code
> they were using in production? Ahem... And if not, why is paying
> students to make patches to code *other* people use in production OK?

Although these questions sound rhetorical, I am going to answer them
anyway.

First, Google does indeed take its own medicine and participate in GSoC
with several of its own projects, e.g. Chromium [1].

Second, from the GSoC FAQ [2]:

  "7. Are mentoring organizations required to use the code produced?

   No. While we hope that all the code that comes out of this program
   will find a happy home, we don’t require organizations to use the
   students' code."

Many participating organization use GSoC as an opportunity to increase
their pool of active contributors, rather than increasing their code
base.


[1] 
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/getting-involved/summerofcode2013
[2] 
http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2014/help_page#7._Are_mentoring_organizations_required