IMO, Grades in courses are irrelevant in GSOC. As a mentor I don't even bother looking at that sort of thing. I just see how well they do on the qualification tasks we give out, how well the student interacts on IRC, and whether there are any things that might interfere with an effective summer (e.g. having another job at the same time, etc).

Not at all, there are many different projects with varying levels of difficulty. Everything from documentation addins to web apps, build system fixes or runtime work. We don't care what your level in school is, we care that you're excited about contributing to open source and propose a project that you can do.

I've mentored with x264 (for Videolan) for 3 years, this year going to be the 4th.

It's an absolutely amazing program and has led to an enormous amount of success for our students so far. Almost all of our successful students have gone on to get real jobs (contract, part-time, or full-time) from their work on x264. Most had absolutely no experience in anything they worked on before they started.

Examples:

Holger Lubitz (2008): Got contract work from Avail Media and CoreCodec for his amazing assembly code skills.

David Conrad (2009): Got hired by Apple due in large part to his multimedia experience with x264 and ffmpeg.

Dylan Yudaken (2009): Used Summer of Code as a reference to get a software dev job in Britain (he's from South Africa).

Oskar Arvidsson (2010): Now working part-time for CoreCodec to improve their assembly code.

Simon Horlicks (2010): Getting paid by Avail Media to finish up his (huge) 2010 Summer of Code project.

Daniel Kang (Google Code-In, 2010): Won top-10 in GCI, got into MIT as a result, and is probably going to get work from CoreCodec. Oh, and he's only 17.

Additionally, x264 has a dual-licensing program -- all successful students, having contributed a large chunk to the codebase, get a share of the profits (like any other major developer).

Here's our ideas page for this year: http://wiki.videolan.org/SoC_x264_2011

I did GSoC last year with FFmpeg, working on the RTP/RTSP layer. It was a lot of fun working on a code base like that -- multimedia seemed so arcane before starting out.

One of the things I appreciated the most were the code reviews. I had awesome mentors, and my skills have improved significantly thanks to the feedback I got.

I haven't contributed much since then (although I am working sporadically on NEONifying the swscale library), but I still monitor the mailing lists, hang around in the IRC channel, and collab with one of my mentors every day on a paying multimedia project. Multimedia hackers are some of the smartest people I know, so I hang around them in the hopes of picking up a few things by osmosis.

The only downside to GSoC was the pay, which is quite low, but I got to do things on my own time, like bicycle around and spend half the day at the beach. It was the first really relaxed summer I've had in a long time, coming off 6 years of college -- didn't feel like getting a real job just then. GSoC fit the bill perfectly for me.

I did GSoC under The Mono Project in 2005, and it was a great experience. Especially because Miguel is extremely awesome, on both a technical and personal level.

Err, no. Google Summer of Code isn't really an internship. You just develop for the project on something you're interested in (and your mentor approves), and you and the mentoring project get paid in chunks over the summer (by Google).

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. There's 175 participating organizations, one of which is Mono, which has been a part of it since the very first year. I know it's a fad to not RTFA, but really, it's not that complicated :)