Google's Code-In in progress

I believe you don't know how Google Code-In work, even if you know what it is.

• The people doing work for Haiku here are not Google employees, they are students interacting for the first time with open source projects. It is great that Google enable them to make the first step to contribute to open source projects, but the students certainly are not "owned" by Google or whatever, and Google has no control on the work they produce.
• The changes made by the students are thoroughy reviewed by GCI mentors. The mentors are thrusted Haiku developers and they are careful to make sure the submitted code is correct, and does not include any malware, trojen, or background "updater".
• There is no contract with Google to get their applications ported, or anything like that. The GCI mentors (again, only people part of the Haiku community - Google does not even allow its own employees to be mentors IIRC) decide what are the tasks to do.

So, yes, we do get some money from Google after this, but not that much if you count the hours spent by the mentors and other people on the IRC channels helping the students making their first steps with Haiku.

You may now be asking yourself why Google is running this. Certainly not philantropy (no one would believe that even if they said so). Here is their explanation which I think is convincing:

• Google uses a lot of open source projects in their development work and infrastructure. It is one of the companies which understands the profit they can make from open source things instead of going by more usual model of licensing some proprietary software from another company or writing everything themselves. So, it is their interest to have more people contributing to open source software. For this they started the Google Summer of Code, then the GCI.
• The Google Summer of Code targets students already in the computer science field or a few other closely related ones (bioinformatics, etc). Google uses a lot of "computer science" stuff and employs skilled people in these areas. Therefore it is their interest to have as much students as possible going to these fields. The GCI is a way to target people in the 13-17 age range, and make them discover what computer science is about and how working in big projects goes. Haiku has entered the GCI since 2010 with great success, because we have a great community of people doing their best to help the students (or anyone else interested in working for Haiku). It didn't go as well for all organisations doing GCI in this and previous years.

So, what do we get: a money compensation from Google, and lot of young people knowing about Haiku and maybe joining the ranks of our developers or just hanging around (oh, and did I mention free T-Shirts?). What do we risk: not much, and if that ever changed we would just stop entering GCI or similar programs.

Google is big, so big that you can't really reject everything in block about it. We can be critical when they do things wrong, but we can also be supportive when they do great things such as GCI. You may think this is "open-source-washing" from them (like there is "greenwashing" for others), and you may be right. But it actually benefits both Google and the participating projects. Why deny that then?