[daniel_solano]

What is most interesting to me is the number of accepted organisations is down significantly: from 190 last year to 137 this year, the lowest since 2007. Naturally, the question that arises is 'Has Google cut funding for GSoC, or is it adopting a significantly different strategy from what they have done the past ten years?'

[ChuckMcM]

I would not be surprised at all if the budget for this has been reduced. Google's profitability is under pressure from its decreasing search advertising margins. The story recently about how YouTube wasn't actually profitable points to how Google has struggled to find anything other than search advertising that could bring in the bacon, and well Facebook is nibbling on that bacon already.

That said, Mozilla (and/or Yahoo!) might be in a good place to host something. A "Get Your Social On" sort of thing with Twitter/Facebook could be intriguing. And generally a non-company specific 'Coding Man' (think Burning Man but with more screens and less dust) sort of festival might be quite the event to attend some day.

[eropple]

I haven't looked, but are each organization getting more or less slots than before?

[daniel_solano]

We don't know, yet. That would be tell-tale if the number of students also dropped significantly.