Re: GSoC 2013

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

chad writes:

 > GSoC is an effort to help get potential hackers hacking, not to
 > outsource programming needs to cheap labor.

It's both, and more.  In particular, it's *not* a mentor-student
relationship, it's a project-student relationship, *represented* by
the mentor.

 > Anyone who actually wants to see Emacs get more involved in GSoC
 > needs to start putting in organizational effort (creating process,
 > identifying projects, recruiting students, recruiting mentors, etc)
 > *before*, not *at* the deadline.

Exactly my point.  Giving Emacs slots is just encouraging its bad
behavior.  There are a lot of well-behaved projects out there, some
with excellent students, who aren't going to get slots.  Emacs is most
likely going to get slots it doesn't deserve.  That sucks.

By the way, I've done all that.  Project identification wasn't very
good (but it was better than the whole GNU Project's ideas page, which
is just plain sad for an organization that preens like the leader of
the whole free software world, and of course Emacs doesn't even have
one), and we deserved to have our org rejected this year.[1]

So I know it's not that much effort that Emacs couldn't do it if it
wanted to.  Emacs just doesn't want to.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Google also has some non-quality criteria that we didn't score
high on -- we may very well not make it next year, either.