This summer, 12 contributors completed the @googleoss Summer of Code program with the Zulip development community. Together, this year’s #GSoC participants wrote 900 commits that have already been merged into Zulip! https://blog.zulip.com/2025/12/02/google-summer-of-code-2025/ #OpenSource #Mentorship
« […] this year 71 out of 79 proposals we received for the #GSoC 2025 were spammy and very often #AI generated. This is a significant increase compared to previous years. I remember that a few years ago there were less than a dozen spammy proposals. »
🤔 Is this trashy effect part of the AI “revolution” that tech bros’re promising?
Quote from #Git mailing list.
Subject: AI guidelines for mentoring programs (like GSoC and Outreachy)
id:CAP8UFD37_qsTjM97GK2EOWHteqoUKdwxjKS-SU629H2LnbTTtA@mail.gmail.com
https://public-inbox.org/git/CAP8UFD37_qsTjM97GK2EOWHteqoUKdwxjKS-SU629H2LnbTTtA@mail.gmail.com/
This summer, 12 contributors completed the @googleoss Summer of Code program with the Zulip development community. Together, this year’s #GSoC participants wrote 900 commits that have already been merged into Zulip! https://blog.zulip.com/2025/12/02/google-summer-of-code-2025/ #OpenSource #Mentorship
« […] this year 71 out of 79 proposals we received for the #GSoC 2025 were spammy and very often #AI generated. This is a significant increase compared to previous years. I remember that a few years ago there were less than a dozen spammy proposals. »
🤔 Is this trashy effect part of the AI “revolution” that tech bros’re promising?
Quote from #Git mailing list.
Subject: AI guidelines for mentoring programs (like GSoC and Outreachy)
id:CAP8UFD37_qsTjM97GK2EOWHteqoUKdwxjKS-SU629H2LnbTTtA@mail.gmail.com
https://public-inbox.org/git/CAP8UFD37_qsTjM97GK2EOWHteqoUKdwxjKS-SU629H2LnbTTtA@mail.gmail.com/
I was suprised to learn that #latinoware 2025 (held at the 🇧🇷🇵🇾🇦🇷 triple border) had over 5,000 atendees and is now the largest FOSS event in Latin America (yay!). It was on the same dates as #gsoc in Munich so I couldn't have attended anyway.
For some reason I lost touch with this event (I gave a talk there around... 2007 or so?). I looked it up here on the fediverse and most of the posts seem to be from 2-3 years ago.
Trying to understand the disconnect...
👻 🎃 JabRef 6.0-alpha.3 Release 🎃 👻
Trick or treat! Happy Halloween from the JabRef team! We are happy to announce the release of JabRef 6.0 Alpha 3
Release Highlights:
- Arm64 Linux support,
- Improved UI for Citations
- New Fetchers: #OpenAlex and #EuropePMC
- Initial Cite As You Write endpoint
- First CLI version #JabKit with integrity check
- #CSL style fixes for #LibreOffice
- #JavaFX 25
#java #opensource #linux #arm #bibliography #academia #citations #texlatex #JabRef #GSOC #gsoc2025
👻 🎃 JabRef 6.0-alpha.3 Release 🎃 👻
Trick or treat! Happy Halloween from the JabRef team! We are happy to announce the release of JabRef 6.0 Alpha 3
Release Highlights:
- Arm64 Linux support,
- Improved UI for Citations
- New Fetchers: #OpenAlex and #EuropePMC
- Initial Cite As You Write endpoint
- First CLI version #JabKit with integrity check
- #CSL style fixes for #LibreOffice
- #JavaFX 25
#java #opensource #linux #arm #bibliography #academia #citations #texlatex #JabRef #GSOC #gsoc2025
Two interesting projects I'm keeping an eye on:
✳️ Karton - A Virtual Machine manager being worked on for #gsoc by @kenoi
✳️ Kretro - A new #libretro frontend by @seshpenguin
There is a Google Summer of Code 2025 proposal to add AI to VLC. The proposal outlines the development of an AI-powered smart media recommendation engine as a native plugin for VLC. The system will analyze users' viewing habits, media metadata, subtitle content, and playback patterns to suggest relevant content from their local libraries.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/projects/ldqbL335
Ugh, Python got over 500 #GSoC applications this year and so many of them are absolutely trash, didn't follow any of the instructions. Most years about half of our applications are like this. But usually we have a lot fewer applicants and the submissions were blank files not plausible AI nonsense.
So I'm stuck reading hundreds of incredibly low quality nonsensical submissions today in hopes to take some workload off my other unpaid volunteer mentors. This is not the volunteer gig I signed up for 15 years ago when it was mostly working with new contributors and not their AI chatbots and I'm grumpy.
