Questions about whether Wine will participate in GSoC in 2022.

[Hui Xiang]

Dear Sir / Madam,

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Hui Xiang, and I am an Electrical and Electronic Engineering student at the University of Manchester. I would like to participate in Google Summer of Code this summer. After doing research on previous programs, I was impressed by The Wine Project. I am writing this email to ask if Wine will participate in GSoC in 2022.

I love Wine’s idea of running Windows apps on other operating systems while keeping the applications running efficiently with the CPU and memory. On Windows, there are a plethora of fantastic apps, such as Solidworks and AutoCAD. This project enables users to take advantage of both the applications and the operating systems through running these apps on diverse operating systems.

I would appreciate the opportunity to make contributions to this project if Wine will participate GSoC in 2022. Thank you for your time. It would give me great pleasure to hear back from you.

Best Regards,
Hui

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hi Hui,
> Am 14.02.2022 um 20:40 schrieb Hui Xiang :
>
> Dear Sir / Madam,
>
> I would appreciate the opportunity to make contributions to this project if Wine will participate GSoC in 2022. Thank you for your time. It would give me great pleasure to hear back from you.

I don't think Wine will participate in GSoC this year. In 2019 and 2020 we did not get any useful applications and in 2021 Wine was not accepted to participate. This year nobody took a lead to submit another application to participate.

We did have many successful students in before ~2018 or so, but it has been increasingly difficult to find good projects that fit the GSoC scope. The easy tasks in Wine are done. Most work that Wine needs is usually difficult to fit in a specific timeframe - e.g. getting a specific application to run - because debugging has zero progress until you find what the problem is and the debugging task is done. Other long term goals are way beyond the scope of GSoC and unsuitable for beginners.

However, we did participate in ISCAS Open Source Promotion Plan last year (https://summer.iscas.ac.cn/help/en/) and might do so again this year. It is more flexible than GSoC, so it has some advantages. We also participated in Outreachy in the past. Also my employer, CodeWeavers, is hiring interns every now and then.

[Henri Verbeet]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 at 11:11, Stefan Dösinger  wrote:
> We did have many successful students in before ~2018 or so, but it has been increasingly difficult to find good projects that fit the GSoC scope. The easy tasks in Wine are done.

I wouldn't necessarily say that. It's true that Wine inherently has
some additional complications compared to some other projects, but
that was true 10 years ago as well. Clearly some modules are more
mature now than they were in the past, but there are also plenty of
new ones. I would say the following though:

- Typical students these days seem more interested in building web
applications or mobile phone applications than some of the more
traditional things Wine is concerned with like font rendering or
building compilers and parsers.

- There is considerable divergence between the interests of Google
and those of the Free Software community.

[Austin English]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 5:00 AM Henri Verbeet  wrote:
> - There is considerable divergence between the interests of Google
>
> and those of the Free Software community.

If we're going to exclude Google Summer of Code for that reason, I'd argue
we shouldn't participate in the ISCAS Open Source Promotion Plan either.

[Henri Verbeet]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2022 at 22:11, Austin English  wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 5:00 AM Henri Verbeet  wrote:
> > - There is considerable divergence between the interests of Google
> >
> > and those of the Free Software community.
>
> If we're going to exclude Google Summer of Code for that reason, I'd argue we shouldn't participate in the ISCAS Open Source Promotion Plan either.

As far as I'm aware there hasn't been an active decision not to
participate in Google Summer of Code, but I imagine these
considerations do play a role into how much effort/enthusiasm various
people are willing to put into it. And ultimately what you need for
these things to be successful is enough people feeling it's worth
their effort.