Well, I’m sorry to announce that my prediction was about right: we didn’t get into this year’s Summer of Code. From what I’ve seen, this year was extremely competitive, and many good projects didn’t get in.

It looks like only one project similar to us got in was OSAF/Chandler – they are a returning project, so that’s not a huge surprise. They have some nice looking Javascript ideas which I don’t think are very applicable to us, sadly, but who knows. They also have a natural language parsing idea which was something I wanted us to do, so I need to investigate what they have and what they’re doing.. I hope they’re doing it for international languages, but we’ll see.

I’m also really happy to see that some of our sister projects at the Conservancy got in – Mercurial and OpenChange, as well as the Software Freedom Law Center itself. It’s also nice to see that a number of projects aren’t simply technical challenges, but software supporting people working on some of the toughest problems in the world: poverty, illness, education, that kind of thing.

Leslie offered feedback to projects, but unfortunately wasn’t able to say too much to me: her response was roughly, “Another example of not enough space: good ideas, good docs, but we can’t take everyone.” In a way, I’m glad: I did everything I could to give Bongo the best chance, and one year our number will come up. Again, she asked that we apply again next year, and I have some ideas about how to improve our application even further: it will need more preparation, but I think we’re almost there in terms of getting selected. We just need that final push to make us irresistable somehow 🙂