We can and should advocate for preserving sideloading.

But boycotting a wonderful public-benefit program that Google has funded for 20 years over this sort of product policy issue seems crazy to me. Sure, GSoC does improve Google's brand.

But Google Summer of Code is one of the most effective charitable programs I've seen from any large corporation. And I think it's very telling that nobody else does anything like it.

Google is is the only company on the planet that cared about supporting the open-source community enough to invest, fund, and administer a program like this that has _no_ direct benefit to the company. (Many corporate grants/sponsorships to OSS projects are in exchange for something tangible).

The scale of GSoC is enormous, and the program has been very meaningful. A huge portion of our contributor community and about half the Kandra Labs team are people who I originally met via GSoC.