X.Org GSoC Is Indeed Dead, But There Is EVoC

As reported previously on Phoronix, X.Org/Mesa/Wayland is no longer involved with Google's Summer of Code. Some changes have also been made concerning the project's independent Endless Vacation of Code.

The Wiki update concerning X.Org GSoC/EVoC finally happened on Thursday by Bart Massey of the X.Org Foundation. The Wiki has been revised to confirm in fact "X.Org is now no longer part of Google Summer of Code." Google hasn't reverted their position on allowing this critical free software project any spots for their summer program where they finance student developers to work on various open-source projects. X.Org had participated in all prior years of GSoC.

The X.Org Foundation is still doing their "Endless Vacation of Code" whereby students can be paid up to $6000 USD to work on X.Org (or Mesa/Wayland) for several weeks/months during any time of the year. However, there is only one known case of a student actually doing EVoC, which was the work started last year on Gallium3D OpenCL support with a Nouveau driver focus. That work was successful, but in part due to a lack of marketing, X.Org EVoC isn't widely known amongst students.

The EVoC update made with the aforementioned Wiki page now also states that non-students can participate in this program. However, those participating non-students won't be paid or compensated in any way. "The X.Org Foundation believes that paying non-students to help develop X leads to a variety of problems, not least of which is complicating the non-profit status of the Foundation."

With X.Org not being in GSoC, hopefully some students will turn to EVoC, but so far there's been no EVoC proposals hitting the mailing lists.

On a related note, this week Egbert Eich did formally announce XDC2012 on the Wiki. All of the key details though have already been shared in earlier Phoronix articles about the Bavarian/Franconian event set to end the day prior to Oktoberfest.