GSOC

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  • Jehan and Ell (from the GIMP project) about GSOC 2018 GIMP cancellation

Jehan : « For the record, our would-be intern had a job proposal, and therefore had to cancel his GSoC proposition. [...] Also for anyone disappointed, I would like to reassure you: if there is one thing that should be learned from past GSoC participation of GIMP, it is that GSoC is far from the best way to improve a software. Personally I am mostly interested in it because it is nice to help some students discover real development world and mentor them. And maybe these students will even stay regular contributors *afterwards*! If we can get a few cool patches in the process, this is cool. But this event should not be considered as a cheap way to get code. Any project which relies mostly on this to improve will mostly get hardly maintainable code.

When I see how some people seem to see GSoC as a miraculous event which we should absolutely join, I am a bit dubious on how you envision this event. Whatever your job is, picture yourself when you were student. Now imagine that you suddenly dropped your student self into your current position which you are in after years of hard work and learning the job though actual real-life projects, successes and failures. Do you really believe that your student self would have just revolutionnized your current job in just a few months? I hope you don't say yes, because that would be a bit sad if you don't believe you evolved since you were students! ;p

In the end, whatever the regular developers do in the same time as any intern is 100 times more important, and I remind that some of us (including myself) are even trying to make a living from GIMP development through crowdfunding with quite weak success for now. Just a small reminder so that people know they can crowdfund us (in case of my own project, all links in my signature) which will be more efficient for any of the goals you proposed in this thread or others than what GSoC could bring us (even if still a cool event, but for helping good students mostly, as I said, not for magically cheap, fast and quality code). »

Ell : « The key to a useful project, I believe, is to have a limited and well-defined objective that does not require a deep understanding of major parts of the GIMP code base. It isn't impossible to come up with projects of that type. »

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