I must have missed the evidence of the preparations by Go-OO to participate in GSoC. This would have given the chance to openly talk
about ways to collaborate on tasks beforehand. You will certainly understand that many OOo contributors are not much induced to engage in a program that separates itself from OpenOffice.org.

I’m not sure students are fully aware that they work on “a branch, or distribution” and potentially do not “add to the OpenOffice.org project”. It would be much appreciated if the mentor/mentee pairs come to an agreement about the home of their code in an early stage. This helps OpenOffice.org contributors to think about the extent of a possible involvement.

And actually students shouldn’t have to care about things like that but have fun and enjoy working on the OpenOffice.org code base.

Again, good luck with the projects
Stefan

Wrt. your unusual theories around Google’s motivation – I notice MySQL was sponsored for the last two years – and Google seems a reasonable company, and a good open source player to boot. *If* your explanation is fair, then I imagine Sun did something unbelievably shoddy to Google to provoke it. Given Sun’s past form around OO.o, that really wouldn’t surprise me.

Sun made many applications to GSoC last year for many projects, which was a lot of work as you can imagine, and all were rejected by Google out of hand. Google’s excuse was they were punishing Sun for the contract dispute between the Java business unit and Apache, but many, many people were very disappointed that they were treated not as community members but as “Sun”.

This year I enquired in advance whether the same thing was going to happen again and Google told me proposals from Sun staff would not be welcome at GSoC. Sun staff will instantly engage with GSoC when we’re assured we’ll not be wasting our time by applying.

“We also have a distinctive approach to code ownership – believing that nicely separable pieces of code should not be assigned to, owned and exploited by a single corporate entity, but owned by all.”

(from http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/mejmeeks)

The students applied under these conditions, so I guess it’s fair to leave the exact implementation and the question of upstreaming (and the timing thereof) as a discussion between mentor and mentee over their jointly produced code. So I anticipate that much of the work will appear first in go-oo, and in some areas, code will be sent up-stream.

It is a bit of a pity here that Sun did not engage with the process, and didn’t offer any mentors – as that would have given much more weight in this question.

I would like to congratulate the students that have been accepted into the program.
I have a question for Thorsten and the group of mentors
from Go-OO. For which tasks will the accomplishments of this summer be
contributed to Openoffice.org and maintained in the OpenOffice.org source repository?

Good luck with the projects
Stefan