GSoC 2009, not accepted as a project this year.

Well I think the title says it all. We weren't accepted as a Google Summer of Code project for 2009. Another news that may shock some of you is that we aren't going to participate under the PHP umbrella this year either. Over the past few weeks we have decided to take our own route as an independent project for the Google Summer of Code 2009. The reasons being that we would get allocated more slots, we'd get students and mentors but first and foremost voters that are solely interested and passionate about PEAR. The reason for us to not go under the PHP umbrella is the lack of foundation/organization-like structure which does not insure that PEAR will get a decent amount of attention from the other internal developers and mentors if we decide that the PEAR project is to hosted under the PHP umbrella. This said, it doesn't mean that "we do not like PHP" - it means that we prefered letting the PHP project have more slots allocated solely to the development of PHP/PECL and that we would get development entirely PEAR-related if we would have gotten accepted. :) It was a move that the group voted on and instead of taking the risk of being rejected and falling back under PHP, we figured that we may as well take responsibility for our actions and if we get accepted we will get more slots and our priorities will be 100% oriented towards PEAR, however if we did get rejected (as we did) falling back to PHP would not be fair to other php subprojects. I would like to say a big thanks to Scott MacVicar who is the GSoC project administrator for the PHP Project this year who has been giving us opportunities for this year's GSoC and even though we did not go with the PHP Project, we considered everything he said. To recap quickly, we made a choice, now we'll have to live with it. In order to make sure this doesn't happen again next year, we'll be interacting with the PHP project GSoC team to try to find a solution that can suit everyone and that insures that each subprojects has mentors that are only related to the subproject. That way when you get mentors to vote, the votes are coming from people with 100% focus on one subject, and not from someone who's interested in 80% on X subject, 15% on subproject y and 5% on subproject z subject. This should improve the quality of the projects accepted and the subprojects accepted as well as the selected students. Thanks for the work of everyone involved. I am going to follow up with a few ideas for anyone that still may be interested :) It's not because we didn't get accepted that we can't have a PSoC ;-) Thanks and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. -- Slan, David