[jdev] Google Summer of Code participants

[Peter Saint-Andre]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 05:22:30PM +0100, Kevin Smith wrote:
> It's been brought to my attention off-list that my posts regarding  
> Psi's SoC application sounded really bitter and selfish; I'm sorry to  
> anyone that thought this. I'm obviously disappointed but the posts  
> weren't supposed to be resentful. They especially weren't supposed to  
> offend the JSF council members who had to make tough decisions about  
> which proposals to support.

Hey, no worries, I'm just about the most easy-going person on the
planet.

In general it was hard to decide which applications were best. The whole
point of the Summer of Code is to enable students to learn about how
open-source development works by working on a project that could be
realistically completed in two months. Many of the applications proposed
projects that were very interesting but whose scope was way too big.
Other applications were intriguing but not very complete with regard to
deliverables, milestones, schedule, coder bio, etc. Other applications
were submitted by people who are already active open-source developers
and who therefore did not fit the profile of people who need to be
introduced to open-source (you might arguue that it would be best to
reward active developers for all their hard work to date, but that is
*not* the intent of the Summer of Code as I understand it). Then we had
competing applications for things like a console client and a compliance
testing system for XMPP -- IMHO none of those applications was clearly
superior, so I could not in good conscience choose one over the others. 
The Jabber Council members did the best they could. If your proposal was 
not accepted, that does not mean we don't like you as a person, we think 
your related project (e.g., Psi) stinks, we don't appreciate your
contributions to the open-source community, etc. There were many factors
involved in approving applications, and the confluence of those factors
led certain applications to bubble up to the top, others to just miss
the cut, and so on. Hopefully we'll be able to do this again next year
and we'll all understand more about how to apply, how to approve, etc.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml