So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
The efforts of Fedora's Summer Coding SIG and our umbrella "Red Hat Summer" effort got a small setback today. After 5 years of successful participation in the Google Summer of Code program, we were not accepted into this year's Summer of Code. While this was unexpected and a little disappointing, it does not stop our summer coding work.
In 2008, Google required the Fedora Project and JBoss.org teams to apply as a single organization to the Summer of Code, since both are Red Hat-sponsored open source projects. While that created some hurdles for us, since we are two very distinct communities with almost no overlap, we met the challenge head-on and created our "Red Hat Summer" group to coordinate our efforts and bring the teams together for our common goal.
"Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime."
As soon as Fedora and JBoss.org began working cooperatively, we also began to focus on making our efforts and resources more generic, such that we could take "Google Summer of Code" and replace "Google" and "Code" with any sponsor and any deliverable of interest. We began slowly working on an architecture that would allow us to support other seasonal development for students without a strict dependency on Google's program. We have greatly appreciated what Google has done with the Summer of Code program, and we are disappointed that we will not be participating this year. I have enjoyed my role as a mentor since 2005 and organization administrator since 2006, and my summer just won't be the same, but we are going to take the opportunity to quickly advance our non-GSoC summer coding initiatives.
We will still welcome students to work under our guidance this year, and we are hard at work to find sponsors to offer some kind of stipend to make it easier for students to participate. We are even looking at how Red Hat can itself be one of these sponsoring organizations, outside of the internship program Red Hat continues to run. Thank you, Google, for getting us started. We will take it from here.
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