GSoC basically changed my entire career. I'm glad that Google keeps this running, especially given that they got rid of other cool competitions like Codejam. Hopefully, they can continue finding the budget for these extremely valuable contributions to open-source.
I was a student in a no-name college with no real chance of landing an internship at the big tech companies, given my cv had neither the prestige of a good college name nor many impressive projects.
GSoC basically allowed me to jump into an open-source project (no credentials needed), prove that I'm skilled enough to contribute and gain meaningful experience solving real world problems. This then snowballed into larger career opportunities later down the line.
i'm not employed by google, nor have i ever been. GSoC is google paying people to work on open-source stuff, with little direct relation to their profits.
