X.Org EVoC To Be Tightened Up, Limited To Existing Contributors

To complement Google's Summer of Code, the X.Org Foundation has long held the Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC) as a year-round, passive event where the foundation would fund students to get involved with X.Org/Wayland/Mesa projects. Sadly, however, it's not been panning out and the rules are being tightened up even more due to past failures.

The X.Org Endless Vacation of Code hasn't been too popular since it's really not actively advertised or promoted by the X.Org Foundation, except for the few articles per year where I mention it or for students going through the X.Org Wiki. Past projects have yielded some success with Gallium3D OpenCL, Nouveau re-clocking, etc. However, there's also been some EVoC projects (and other X.Org initiatives) where in the end we don't hear much (anything?) about the results.

The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors are more or less throwing in the towel now and limiting EVoC to only existing contributors of the project(s) in question. Yesterday's meeting summary mentioned:

We can't handle completely new contributors, we don't have the capabilities to handle it. And we don't have the funds to burn on projects that fail when the contributor can't get up to speed as expected.

New requirement for EVoC project is that the the student is already involved with the project and known to the community so that the majority of project time is spent on the actual project, not on figuring out build systems, contributions rules, etc.

Given their lack of resources and already multiple examples of wasted funds at the foundation due to mismanagement, it seems like they'd be better off with going toward a simpler "bug bounty" approach where they'd just pay after the fact, would still encourage new contributors to get involved, and would have defined criteria for the bugs/features to get all or nothing.