Sun offers prizes for open-source innovation

 

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Posted on 6 Dec 2007 at 09:46

Sun is offering cash prizes to the open-source community, in an attempt to stimulate further innovation in open-source projects.

The company plans to award annual prizes worth around $1 million to "interesting initiatives" in six Sun-sponsored open-source projects.

Pithily titled the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, Sun has chosen the GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, OpenSparc and OpenOffice.org communities to take part during the first year of the competition.

Each community will have its own rules for entry, which will be announced next month, with the winners expected to be announced in August 2008.

Sun unveiled the competition at the FOSS.IN/2007 event in Bangalore. "I'm announcing it in India because that's where I expect the greatest open-source community growth to come from in the near future," explains Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer on his blog.

"If we can play a part in catalysing the emergence of India as a key international open source powerhouse, the effect on the software industry will be huge."

The competition follows a similar announcement by Google last month, in which it offered a $10 million prize for developers building applications on its mobile operating system.

Author: Stuart Turton