TL;DR: Gentoo not selected for GSoC 2015 ‘to make way for new orgs”. All is not lost: some Gentoo projects will be available within other organizations.<\/p>\n
As you may\u00a0have already noted, the Gentoo Foundation was not selected as a mentoring organization for\u00a0GSoC 2015. Many immediately started to speculate why that happened.<\/p>\n
Today I had an opportunity to talk (on irc) to Carol Smith, from Google’s\u00a0Open Source Programs Office. I asked her why we had been rejected, if they had seen any issue with our application to GSoC, and if she had comments about it. Here’s what her answer was:<\/p>\n
yeah, i\u2019m sorry that this is going to be disappointing
\nbut this was just us trying to make way for new orgs this year \ud83d\ude41
\ni don\u2019t see anything wrong with your ideas page or application, it looks good<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThen I asked her the following:<\/p>\n
one discussion we had after our rejection is if we should keep focusing on doing GSoC to attract contributors as we’ve been doing, or focus more on having projects actually be implemented, and how much you cared about it<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To which she replied:<\/p>\n
well, i\u2019ll say that wasn\u2019t a factor in this rejection
\nhaving said that, we in general like to see more new developers instead of the same ones year over year
\nwe\u2019d prefer gsoc was used to attract new members of the community
\nbut like i said, that wasn’t a factor in your case<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt’s pretty clear we haven’t done anything wrong, and that they like what we do and the way we do it. Which doesn’t mean we can’t improve, by the way. I know Carol well enough to be sure she was not dodging my questions to politely\u00a0brush me aside. She says things as they are.<\/p>\n
So, what happened then? First, the overall number of accepted organizations went down roughly 30% compared to last year. The immediate thought which comes to mind is “budget cut”. Maybe. But the team who organizes GSoC is largely the same year over year. You can’t indefinitely grow an organization at constant manpower. And last year was big.<\/p>\n
Second, and probably the main reason why we were rejected is that this year small and\/or newer organizations were favored. This was explicitly said by Carol (and I believe others) multiple times. I’m sure some\u00a0of you will argue that this isn’t a good idea, but the fact is it’s their program and they run it the way they want. I will certainly not blame them. This does not mean no large organizations were selected, but that tough choices had to be made among them.<\/p>\n
In my opinion, Carol’s lack of words to explain why we were not selected meant “not bad but not good enough”. The playing field is improving every year. We surely felt a little too confident and now have to step up our game. I have ideas for next year, these will be discussed in due time.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, some Gentoo projects will be available within other organizations. I will not talk about what hasn’t been announced yet, but I can certainly make this one official:
\nglee: Gentoo-based Linux appliances on Minnowboard<\/a>
\nIf you’re interested, feel free to contact me<\/a> directly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TL;DR: Gentoo not selected for GSoC 2015 ‘to make way for new orgs”. All is not lost: some Gentoo projects will be available within other organizations. As you may\u00a0have already noted, the Gentoo Foundation was not selected as a mentoring organization for\u00a0GSoC 2015. Many immediately started to speculate why that happened. Today I had an … Continue reading Google Summer of Code 2015<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/calchan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}