Google Summer of Code with Ruby Central

Ruby Central will once again participate the Google Summer of Code in 2008 as a mentoring organization:
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ruby/about.html

Pat Eyler has put together an idea page, which is a great reference. While every organization may have different policy, Ruby Central has been happy to see students' own ideas in the past, and I believe this year is not an exception. Feel free to submit your own exciting ideas so that the mentors can pick the best ones.

Today is the first day for Google to accept student applications. For student who are interested in participating, my advise is to apply as early as possible: normally students who apply early has a slight advantage because mentors will have more time to read their applications.

And another advise for future GSOC students is: once accepted, please make sure you are well prepared for the program. Google and mentors normally assume you to work near fulltime in the summer, but unfortunately every year we saw 'disappearing' students during the program. If for some reasons you can not make it after being accepted, please communicate with your mentor organization early so that they can make better adjustment.

XRuby license changed to BSD

XRuby had been licensed under GNU General Public License v2. For people who want to create solutions based on XRuby, this means they had to adopt GPL as well, which is not always possible. So since 0.3.3, we changed the license to BSD. Hopefully this will help XRuby gain more acceptance, especially from the corporate world.