Google's summer of code started 21 years ago and has been a positive thing from every angle.

Remember that back in 2005 Google was still largely running under its founding principles of "Do no evil" and I honestly believe it was a truly altruistic move. Certainly, a great amount of coders got access to skills and support they would never have otherwise, and a huge amount of projects benefited from it. Google weren't the only supporters of it, I know Suse contributed and likely others.

So why do they still do it now that Google is all grown up and abandoned those founding principles?

I suspect it's due to some or all of these reasons;

• Why not? It's good PR and cheap advertising.
• They get to spot good developers early on and enhance their hiring quality.
• Those developers bring energy, skills and access to projects. Those are the active employees that every employer wants.
• The projects are used by Google so improving them is net benefit to the company.
• Cancelling it now would lead to bad PR and bad feeling. Even Google doesn't want to needlessly waste a good thing. And if they did stop it, a competitor might swoop in and not only take the benefits from it whilst looking like the white knight.