I'd like to let you know our application has not been accepted into Google Summer of Code, for the third time in a row. I attached an (autogenerated) reply, which encourages us to reapply for future instances of the program. I would not find a better way to express sarcasm than asking us to reapply in future.

Amongst accepted organizations there are:

WinLibre - a distribution of opensource software for Windows platform.

Battle for Wesnoth - a free turn based strategy game.

Umit - a frontend for a network scanner (one of their GSoC ideas is to create a "Umit Assistant" which would look like a Clippit - the animated assistant that features Microsoft Office).

TurboGears - a web framework written in Python.

Thousand Parsec - a bunch of games based on a common framework for building turn based space empire building games.

Systers: Woman in computing - a community of women in computing. For some strange reason the founding person is "Robin".

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - non-profit org founded to develop safe artificial intelligence software and to raise awareness of dangers of AI technologies.

I just stated a few examples. I highly value those projects, however I just can't understand that yet another framework in python, or a game engine for a turnbased strategies, or a collection of FOSS software for Windows with a package manager (which we already have, and which could have been improved), or an institution which believes that AI takes over the world and tries to stop that are way more important than supporting an organization whose product would be of use for millions of people, and would create a real alternative operating system compatible with the vast majority of existing software and hardware.

Our friendly OS project Haiku gets accepted every year, so being an OS is not a problem.

Wine is certainly accepted every year from the beginning, and this year is not an exception. So it's definately not a problem of "legal fear" of Microsoft.

What is the problem then? I leave it to you to decide what's the problem. However, as for me, I see Google Summer of Code is nothing close to supporting free software world, but rather an expensive way of advertising.

I want to hope I am wrong.

With the best regards,

Aleksey Bragin

ReactOS Foundation President.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: <socghop.noreply@gmail.com>

Date: Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:48 AM

Subject: Thank you for your application