On 19-Mar-08, at 8:28 AM, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote: > On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 1:36 AM, Dinesh Joshi > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> who are willing to learn BUT dont have experience are thrown out and >> downright discouraged. This is not the point of GSoC and the whole >> reason it was started for. > > I don't quite know about the motives of GSoC
I think the prime motiviations for google are two: 1. google uses a lot of foss stuff and so has an interest in the foss products it uses getting better. 2. google gets an evaluation of the 900 best students around as well as introduction to the best open source programmers around the motivations for projects are: they get free paid labour for two months to improve their applications. That said, the attitude of different projects differ. Some of them plan carefully, monitor their students closely and interact well. They also do not hesitate to fail students if necessary, but always after giving them several chances and asking fellow mentors to vote on the issue. In other projects anything goes - if the mentor and student are good some good work results. Often the mentor just signs off on the student without even looking at the code. There are organisations which have selected students otherwise than on merit - I know a case where the organisation was bullied into accepting a student. I would rate the success rate at 50% or so - which is very good compared to the average success rate of FOSS projects which is about 5% or less. So, for the good organisations a lot of pluses are necessary. In some places newbies to foss programming get accepted and succeed too. And by and large, the success of the student depends on his own initiative - very few developers have the time to mentor a student closely over a period of two months. -- regards Kenneth Gonsalves Associate, NRC-FOSS [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://nrcfosshelpline.in/code/ -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
