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by cookiecaper 5242 days ago
I love GSOC and I really, really wish that more companies would do something similar. It is a GREAT way to get much-needed improvements in open-source software, teach a student some real, in-the-trenches skills that will be used throughout his career (and hopefully kicking off a meaningful career in OSS and diverting from the dark path of corporate .NET/Java jockey), and get an amazing amount of development value per dollar.

The real question is, "why is Google the only company that does something like this?" Though it doesn't fit exactly the same way I could even see a similar mentorship program as part of Y Combinator or other startup incubators. There's really no excuse for companies like Red Hat, Yahoo, Canonical and others that are heavily dependent on OSS not to do this.
2 comments
wicker 5242 days ago
I completely agree with you on the merits of the program. Why don't more companies do it on the scale of GSOC? Organizing it must take multiple full-time people. It'd be great to see more programs where students get paid for their work but I want to point out that it's not the only way companies and students are both benefiting from collaboration.

I'm at Portland State and we've got a solid six-month capstone program in computer science where local companies, including several in open source, are working with student teams. I know electrical/computer has a similar program with a more hardware focus. It's not that GSOC is the only program where companies work with students, only the most visible.

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tikhonj 5242 days ago
Except for GSOC, the students aren't working for Google at all: they're just working on random open source projects and get a stipend from Google for it. This is very different from a company--even an open source one--working with students directly.
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gmartres 5242 days ago
> "why is Google the only company that does something like this?"

Not a company, but last summer the European Space Agency organised the Summer of Code in Space. The homepage (http://sophia.estec.esa.int/socis2011/) seems to be down, but the mailing-list (https://groups.google.com/group/esa-socis) is still up. One important difference with the GSoC is that it's limited to students of European schools.

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