I really hope this is not going to turn into a flame / paranoia fest. So here's my cool-headed, although speculative, answer:

* GSoC has had a tendency to rotate open source projects. Lots of new projects seem to have been added, and some others will have to go. * In general this year there seem to be a lot of science (bioinformatics, geospatial, etc) projects, more than before, and that may be due to a changing focus. * The Mozilla foundation is not a small organisation and could afford for internships themselves, in fact I believe they did just that in the last few years.

I agree with this. Someone on Reddit was wondering why Blender had not been chosen either for GSoC (as explained by Ton Roosendaal on Twitter[1]), and I don't think Blender has any rivalry with Google ;)

[1] https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/572473379648888832

I would guess that this has to do with Mozilla taking Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu as the primary search engines in Firefox in relative countries[1]... But I'm no insider so I can't tell you anything for certain.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an...

I don't think this is the case. Google has rejected a number of higher profile open source projects this year, in addition to Mozilla.

I'm not sure if this is because of some sort of rivalry, but from what I see many of the organisations that have been regularly selected have been rejected, although some of the golden ones like KDE, Fedora made it.

I don't think it would be for rivalry, it maybe just that they wanted focus more on getting more contributors to the new organisations that really need exposure and contributors. Also if it was rivalry would easily do it elsewhere and probably not at GSoC.

Not just Mozilla, Melange isn't there this time too.

btw, http://planet.mozilla.org give a read

It's way more than just Mozilla: https://www.ostraining.com/blog/general/gsoc/

"over 130 projects were dropped and over 80 new projects added"

No idea, but it does seem the programme has been scaled back. Last year there were 190 organisations accepted, and this year only 137, the fewest since 2007.

Of course it is not because of any rivalry as it used to accept Twitter which is their Google plus rival.

I think even twitter in not in the list this time.