Ask HN: Why Mozilla was rejected in GSoC this year?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136244

by sudmishra • 11 years ago

17 10 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Does it have to do something with Chrome-Firefox and Android-Firefox OS rivalry?

brrt• 11 years ago

I really hope this is not going to turn into a flame / paranoia fest. So here's my cool-headed, although speculative, answer:

* GSoC has had a tendency to rotate open source projects. Lots of new projects seem to have been added, and some others will have to go. * In general this year there seem to be a lot of science (bioinformatics, geospatial, etc) projects, more than before, and that may be due to a changing focus. * The Mozilla foundation is not a small organisation and could afford for internships themselves, in fact I believe they did just that in the last few years.

ePierre• 11 years ago

I agree with this. Someone on Reddit was wondering why Blender had not been chosen either for GSoC (as explained by Ton Roosendaal on Twitter[1]), and I don't think Blender has any rivalry with Google ;)

[1] https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/572473379648888832

folehoul• 11 years ago

I'm not sure if this is because of some sort of rivalry, but from what I see many of the organisations that have been regularly selected have been rejected, although some of the golden ones like KDE, Fedora made it.

I don't think it would be for rivalry, it maybe just that they wanted focus more on getting more contributors to the new organisations that really need exposure and contributors. Also if it was rivalry would easily do it elsewhere and probably not at GSoC.

sliekasbekelniu• 11 years ago

I would guess that this has to do with Mozilla taking Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu as the primary search engines in Firefox in relative countries[1]... But I'm no insider so I can't tell you anything for certain.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an...

iends• 11 years ago

I don't think this is the case. Google has rejected a number of higher profile open source projects this year, in addition to Mozilla.

mascot66992• 11 years ago

Of course it is not because of any rivalry as it used to accept Twitter which is their Google plus rival.

mascot66992• 11 years ago

I think even twitter in not in the list this time.

daniel_solano• 11 years ago

No idea, but it does seem the programme has been scaled back. Last year there were 190 organisations accepted, and this year only 137, the fewest since 2007.

oswalpalash• 11 years ago

Not just Mozilla, Melange isn't there this time too.

btw, http://planet.mozilla.org give a read

ekaln• 11 years ago

It's way more than just Mozilla: https://www.ostraining.com/blog/general/gsoc/

"over 130 projects were dropped and over 80 new projects added"

Ask HN: Why Mozilla was rejected in GSoC this year?

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