The Goldfish Chronicles

I’ve seen it said a few times that Google Summer of Code is a recruiting effort and we should not be happy that they do it. Most recently was on a slashdot thread [okay - I suspect you could find any statement you want on some slashdot thread or other - a kind of inverse monkey+typewriter system], and said thread kicked this blog entry out of my head and into the ether where blog entries sit while I find time to write them.

I suspect that the statement is pretty true - GSOC and Recruiting. It helps them recruit. It also builds some goodwill. It makes Open Source projects better by having more code being done and I’m sure Google use some of it. All of this is true. Don’t worry about whether you should be thankful or not for all of that. Here’s why GSOC is a good thing.

Users aren’t the most important thing to an Open Source project; and neither is code being written. The constrained resource for the vast majority of Open Source project is contributor time; and the chief method of getting more contributor time is to get more contributors. More employees if you will.

This is the best thing that GSOC does. It does potential recruiting for Google sure - but it also does recruiting for Open Source projects. We don’t want companies to dump code on us, we want people to join in with the work. Recruiting is why the common answer to a request for enhancement in Open Source is “Got patch?”.

The deal, as such, with Google is that we, the Open Source world, do their prescreening in return for getting new recruits. There’s an additional benefit for us too. Before they join Google (or other company of your choice), they pick up the Open meme.

Bwahaha etc.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.