VLC is another such project coming from a french engineering school AFAIK. I do some TA in such schools (ENSEIRB) and every year I make students contribute to

VLC is another such project coming from a french engineering school AFAIK. I do some TA in such schools (ENSEIRB) and every year I make students contribute to OSS, generally by writing small plug-ins to an existing software, it always works fine. Not a lot of them keep going afterwards though.