[Kstars-devel] GSoC slots

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi

I suppose all you students are on this mailing list. This is that part
of the timeline when the Google distributes its limited slots to open
source projects, and large open source projects distribute those even
more limited precious slots to various proposals in KDE. While
students owe their "allegiance" only to the project and their summer
job, mentors have to see the interest of both KDE and the open source
community at large, and the students at the same time. It's hard to be
completely fair to one party without doing some injustice to the
other. That's part of the reason I usually recommend that students
apply to multiple projects (despite that not being in the interest of
the organization), because you shouldn't lose out just because of
other factors.

Let us hope that all turns out well at the end of the day, but I'm
just writing this to prepare us all in advance and point out to you
that if we didn't pick you, it doesn't mean that you weren't good
enough to do a GSoC. It's just that there are too many factors
involved in picking a proposal -- not merit alone. I hope y'all will
understand this. We'll be happy to have all of you contribute to
KStars / KDE in general and I'm sure there will be a lot of people in
every KDE project willing to invest a whole lot of time in making you
a contributor, irrespective of whether you were given one of those
precious GSoC slots or not.

I feel bad for it even before any decision is taken by Google, even as
we build up our list of proposals ordered by desirability (which
usually amounts to many factors -- KDE's overall good, proposals'
merit, conflicting proposals, number of slots we can expect,
mentor-power that we have), which is why I felt I should send this
mail out. Please do not assume that our selection implies anything
about your abilities.

This year has been amongst the better ones in terms of good proposals.

Regards
Akarsh