On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:38 PM, Niklas Broberg
I'm at a loss as to what criteria is actually used to judge success here. It seems to me a bit like the eternal discussion between "basic research" and "applied research". Just because something (research/library/project) doesn't have an immediate, palpable impact and/or delivers a visible tool, that certainly doesn't imply that it doesn't have merit or won't have as profound an impact on the domain, if more diffuse than a tool (or other palpable deliverable) would.
/Niklas
There may be an eternal discussion on it, but it seems pretty clear to me which side SoC comes down on: http://code.google.com/soc/ "Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all." or http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/faqs#goals # Google Summer of Code has several goals: * Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all * Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development * Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers * Provide students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer (think "flip bits, not burgers") * Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette) -- gwern