Hi,

We would like to let you know that due to the lack of mentors and org admins, openSUSE won't participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC)[1] this year.

In the last time, some people have claimed that participating in GSoC is not worthwhile and that we don't get anything out of it. We strongly disagree with this statement. Many motivated students have got to know and joined openSUSE thanks to GSoC (such as both of us). In our view, mentoring is one of the most important parts of an open source project. Welcoming new contributors and investing some of our free time to help them makes openSUSE much more than just some software, whose code is available online. It is not only about hacking and the number of students that stay in our community, but also about sharing our culture of working openly and creating awareness of the open source movement in the next generation of developers. GSoC gives us the chance to reach students all around the world that most likely wouldn't hear about openSUSE in another way. In addition, it allows students to work full time in open source projects by supporting them economically. Because of that, we hope to see openSUSE again in GSoC. This is the work that have been done in the last years and that may be useful in case someone wants to bring openSUSE to GSoC in the future:

- Mentoring page[2] - Mentoring page code[3] - Application[4] - Blog posts in news.opensuse.org[5] - Twitter mentoring account[6]

Lastly, we would like to thank again all our passionate mentors and org admins and everybody else who made possible that openSUSE participated in GSoC.

Regards,

Ana María Martínez Gómez Christian Bruckmayer

[1] - https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com [2] - https://101.opensuse.org [3] - https://github.com/openSUSE/mentoring [4] - https://github.com/openSUSE/mentoring/wiki/GSoC-Organization-Application-201... [5] - https://news.opensuse.org/category/project/mentoring/gsoc [6] - https://twitter.com/opensusementors