Summary: if you think of this purely in terms of getting contributions to your FOSS project, and in particular if you think about the amount of time spent mentoring versus the amount of time needed for a developer to write the code themselves, you're doing it wrong. It exists primarily to provide mentorship so that we'll have more FOSS developers in the future, and from that perspective it works awesomely, whether or not any individual project gets lucky and gets a pile of useful code.
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.
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.
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.
It was awesome.
What was I working on? Printing under linux.
Perhaps the very definition of not-sexy. Which is just fine by me since that leaves tons of unsolved challenges.
Before I would never have had the courage to contribute to a linux sub-system. Who am I to bug true unix hackers with inane questions like: "How do I build our package?" or "I'm sorry I made a mess of our changelog."!
GSoC solved this barrier. How? Because I knew I would be able to put in the time to learn the domain and be useful. And in turn they knew I would be around long enough to justify the inane questions.
I am very thankful for GSoC, and I think my new co-contributer, and former mentor, is as well.
Mine wasn't at Google, but at a startup that decided to keep me on and just got acquired, so it all worked out pretty well!
I am considering applying as a mentor for an open-source project I maintain. The project - an Android app - has 30,000+ users, but the development team is basically me and a handful of folks who have submitted patches or are willing to mentor. Is this too "small-potatoes?"
I wasn't able to find a link for what the actual application will entail. Where can I find that?
Any tips, thoughts, or advice for people who have previously administered or mentored a project - particularly for small groups?
