Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) has been around since 2005, sponsoring students to work on specific, clearly defined projects, supervised by mentors from OSS projects.



GSoC 2010 is coming up, and sponsors a long list of OSS organizations.



Dynamic languages are well represented, with accepted mentor organizations for

Other projects also offer project ideas that involve Ruby, eg.

Meanwhile, EngineYard together with RubyCentral, decided to set up the Ruby Summer of Code. The project has attracted sponsors which provided enough money to finance 20 projects. Mentor applications are open until the end of the week, student applications start April 5th. There's already a list of potential projects for Rails and projects for JRuby.