The larger GNU projects that have the manpower and ecosystem to deal with this on their own usually apply separately. The GNU ecosystem is much much bigger than them though. And its the smaller projects that usually benefit the most out of GSoC. So its quite unfortunate that GNU has been left out this year.
I started out as a GSoC student for GNU Wget 10 years ago and am now the maintainer. Many smaller projects like GNU Poke, MHD, coreutils, lilypond, Guix, etc. do really rely on a fresh batch of contributors every year that we try to convert into regular long term contributors.
indeed. i also remember at least at some point umbrella organizations were preferred because they could support many other smaller projects. so it's actually surprising that GNU as umbrella organization did not get accepted. any of the individual GNU projects that did get accepted could have instead joined the GNU umbrella if they were rejected individually.
I started out as a GSoC student for GNU Wget 10 years ago and am now the maintainer. Many smaller projects like GNU Poke, MHD, coreutils, lilypond, Guix, etc. do really rely on a fresh batch of contributors every year that we try to convert into regular long term contributors.