I'm generalizing here but I would hazard to guess a good majority of OSS project maintainers (myself included) do so in their spare time and have full-time jobs. It's unrealistic to leave a job for a 3 month "retreat", regardless of how great the opportunity is.
I'm not suggesting it won't work, I think it's a fantastic program and I'm rooting for its success. I'm just suggesting you may want to consider remote opportunities (maybe with occasional visits for in-house tech talks) for future iterations which would undoubtedly increase the talent pool and presumably be more effective at delivering your end-goal.
Sure, it's not going to work for the majority of OSS developers; but nothing is. It's nice to have different kinds of opportunities available. Some people can do stuff in their free time; some may be more productive with a dedicated sprint. Some people may have the opportunity to do it between jobs; some developers are consultants, and can probably find a way to free their schedule up for a few months if they can justify it with the extra income.
Different companies contribute in different ways. The company I work for funds major features that we need, as well as having support contracts with the primary developers of some of the key software that we use, and we contribute back patches when we find bugs that need fixing. Google does their Summer of Code, in which students can work remotely over their summer break, plus does primary development of a lot of projects like Android and Chrome, and contributes to others like the Linux kernel. Red Hat and Canonical mostly develop open source software directly. The Gnome OPW funds internships for women, over several periods over the course of the year.
So there are lots of opportunities out there, with a lot of different ways to get funding and support. I don't think that each program needs to be all things for all people; it's OK to have particular targeted and focused programs, either on different groups of developers, different projects, different types of time commitment, and so on.
I completely agree with everything you said. I got the impression from the blog post they are looking for people to solve real world problems, and people who are good at that are generally employed (comfortably). I hope the program is successful and they expand it at some point to allow for different types of arrangements.
Yes - the fact that many/most promising OSS projects are built by professionals who would either need to leave their job or take time off from their job makes this a challenge.
Yep, the retreat in its current form definitely has some constraints. However, we hope that it'll reach a few really awesome maintainers/projects, and also serve as a starting point for future programs in this space.
I have a pretty flexible work schedule, and offers like this would actually encourage me to push to open up some of my day-to-day work. I'll probably try to drum up some support around doing something similar in Boulder too.
I'm not suggesting it won't work, I think it's a fantastic program and I'm rooting for its success. I'm just suggesting you may want to consider remote opportunities (maybe with occasional visits for in-house tech talks) for future iterations which would undoubtedly increase the talent pool and presumably be more effective at delivering your end-goal.