Well, maybe you are right - there is a lack of information. I guess this is primarily because most people with an open source/programming background are likely to know about it. Maybe we should provide additional information about GSoC?
"Google Summer of Code" is a sponsorship program for students to get involved in open source projects, their contributions will be awarded with stipends of $ 5000 US. For open source projects, it is a great way for attracting new contributors, for students it is a great way for getting hands on experience doing "real work", for a real software development project. Developers who help mentor students, get awarded $ 500 US for their efforts.
I agree in that it would not really be directly useful for any efforts related to the local weather system at the moment.
For projects to be considered for GSoC, they should fulfill some criteria - such as keeping the student busy for several months.
Traditionally, mentoring support would be provided by core developers.
For open source projects this is not just a great way for possibly attracting new contributors, but also for getting important work done - i.e. work that requires programming on a full time basis for several months, work that cannot be easily done without having paid full time developers, which many open source projects lack.
So supporting a FlightGear GSoC application would not literally "support Google", but instead FlightGear. In fact, Google still gets to pick which open source projects and efforts they want to sponsor. Historically, they seem to focus a lot on key technologies that are sort of critical to their own business, i.e. by supporting Python, GCC, Apache, Mozilla etc
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an annual program, first held from May to August 2005,[1] in which Google awards stipends of 5000 USD[2] to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free software / open-source coding project during the summer. The program is open to students aged 18 or over
The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit from them. The mentors then rank the applications and submit the ranked list to Google. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets, and selects the top-n applications for that organization, where n is the number of projects assigned to them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
Is it just me or is there no community support for the GSoC. I don't know why there would be, but very few people are contributing to the effort. So, seriously, is there any real support for this, or is it even worth the consideration? After all, if the community doesn't support it what's the point?
You only have to check out the wiki or the mailing lists to see that there is clearly lots of interest in GSoC, the bottleneck again is man power: particpating in GSoC requires a coordinated effort to get things in shape, writing up project ideas, finalizing the application template, looking for suitable students, finding capable mentors.
FlightGear has pretty much a track record of performing pretty badly in those departments, i.e. organizing long term efforts, planning and coordinating things. This is not due to the project itself, but simply due to a lack of people with sufficient spare time to do these sorts of things on a long term basis.
To my understanding, there is really lots of interest in attracting more contributors to get things done, but it isn't going to happen without some work in advance.
GSoC in particular requires some beaurocratic work.
This is something that developers in general, but also open source developers in particular are pretty bad at.
Simply because they are largely motivated by doing coding, and not by doing boring, redundant stuff.
On the other hand, other contributors (non coding), obviously feel that they are not qualified to start the whole application process, because they are simply no core developers.
So it's a vicious circle...