They probably also have better internships (paying aside). I've been 4 times in GSoC and what I can tell you is that as far as I'm concerned this is the most interesting thing I can do over the summer.

An internship here involves at best, some random module in some offshore product, at worst a "hello world" type project in $insert_whatever_technology_the_company_happens_to_use.

I love hacking on FLOSS and I'm not that interested in how much I'm payed (as long as it's decent), but there's no way I could find a job where I could work on FLOSS on a 400miles radius. I guess this explains why so many eastern europeans and indians.

I might be wrong but my feeling is that here in the EU there are few to none hacker-friendly jobs.