But not the Pylons project [ http://www.pylonshq.com/ ] (Ref: http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss/msg/6b9bb138da... )?

What is GSoC, the American Idol popularity contest?

A number of smaller Python-based projects were denied, but the Python Software Foundation was pretty generous in accepting projects that are using Python rather than working on Python itself. If you check out http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/python you'll see that Sphinx, PySoy, NumPy, and others are getting work done under the PSF umbrella, instead of under each specific project's leadership.

I think things were done this way to reduce organizational overhead, but now I'm just speculating.

Can't support all open source projects. Django clearly has the momentum that the others don't.

That has nothing to do with it. There are specific guidelines for accepting a specific organization based on their proposal, their community, their willingness and ability to become involved with the students.

The organization also has to apply.

I'm excited to see that someone is working on a high level database API. This will be very useful for hooking up non traditional databases like bigtable or couchDB.

I don't think they're going to do any more abstraction. What you'll be able to do is query quickly in another database. So for example build a web app with access to the company's legacy accounts database or something. No abstractions over schema free DB's.

Django already does this quite well:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/legacy-databases/

So it's hopefully something else.

why is Django at GSOC news and not any of the other 149 organizations? or any of the other 994 accepted projects?

I guess it's the GSOC students/mentors who are upvoting this news.