Dear community On the smalltalk-gsoc-mentors@googlegroups.com janko is kind of declaring that ESUG was not doing a good job managing GSOC. We feel insulted and we are quite concerned by that fact. Personally if students would not be involved I would vote that ESUG does not have anything to do with GSOC. Because it costs us money, time and stress. Note in addition that we never interferred with the choice or anything. I will ask the ESUG board to decide because we cannot do the job, spend time, money and be treated like that. Sorry! We are sad but this is like that. Then we do not like the kind of mails that Janko is sending us about the fact that ESUG is biased towards Pharo. Where are the research teams and teachers? Of course: the mails of janko are just so nice. I let you judge. It is particularly fun since this year we (the pharo board) decided not to organise a Pharo conference to avoid competing with ESUG.
About motivations for my proposal:
1. 'Smalltalk' is more recognizable name on first spot that 'ESUG' . And this matters when a student looks at around 150 GSoC organizations to choose, which one to check and try. See last year list of orgs.
2. ESUG is currently regarded by many as too biased towards Pharo. Let we avoid starting debating is this is true or not. Making our org more independent will I hope remove any remaining doubt about that.
I feel shocked and insulted but I take it easy, having success make you as easy target for jaleous people. This is strange that some people would prefer to have a non existing/moving open-source smalltalk. May be the losers theory. I added the answer of marcus below (because marcus usually is much calmer than me) so that Janko succeeded to get marcus reacting like that is a nice proof in itself. Seriously Smalltalk is in a so good shape in presence of lua, Javascript, ruby and python, clojure that we should fight. Excellent idea thank for this nice initiative. Stef Begin forwarded message:
From: Janko Mivšek <janko.mivsek@gmail.com> Subject: [gsoc-mentors] Running under 'Smalltalk' org. name Date: 8 Feb 2014 08:46:18 GMT+1 To: smalltalk-gsoc-mentors@googlegroups.com Reply-To: smalltalk-gsoc-mentors@googlegroups.com
Dear mentors,
I propose that we run this year GSoC simply under 'Smalltalk' name. Mentoring organization will be us mentors of past and current GSoCs, as the name 'mentoring organization' implies anyway. Such organization therefore doesn't need to be some kind of legal entity.
Because I need to open a new website and we have only one week to deadline, decision needs to be done soon.
Best regards Janko
--- Janko Mivšek Smalltalk GSoC Admin Team
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Of course you need it: I filled out quite some paperwork for Google. ESUG is an official Google supplier, for that I filled american tax forms and so on. Without an organisation that will be very difficult. How do yu receive money for the flight if someone goes to the meeting in the fall? One of the reasons why the Smalltalk GSOC was accepted was I think that it was the same organisation that is already in the books of google. And I do not see why to change that: ESUG did a good job, we even lost money (that is, we spend more money on additional Summer of Code slots than got in with the money from google). We payed all additional expenses of the people going to the Summit: Google only pays the flight and hotel. Everyhting else not (e.g. going from the airpot to the hotel). What we need to discuss this year is if additional slots make sense: We had last year the fast that a) it was very expensive for ESUG b) even then, we got complaints that it was unfair that we did not pay the same as google c) that it was very extremely unfair that the student could not put “Google Summer of Code” on the CV. The last is the Killer: money from ESUG is just money. GSoC is more. So we ask if it is really worth to spend the money if even the students are not happy about it. And if your motivation behind is that this way you think it will be easier to enable “Quotas” for different Smalltalks: I think this is a dumb idea. Yes, Pharo is very active. So could every other Smalltalk be, too. They just need to do it. If they do not, it is not my duty to limit my activity for “Fairness”. Limiting the activity level of those who do to be more “in line” with what those do who do nothing is just *insane*. It’s a description of death itself. Marcus