SANTA CLARA, USA: Sun Microsystems Inc., has announced the winners of the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program, designed to fuel innovation around OpenSolaris. The OpenSolaris program included both a contest and a student grant component and was part of Sun's Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, a multi-year program running across several open source communities with a $1 Million total prize.

"Solaris has always been the 'gold standard' for other operating systems to emulate, and Sun took the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement by storm by publishing Solaris' source code," said Grand Prize winner Al Hopper of Genunix.Org. "The OpenSolaris project is now more than three years old, has a healthy and growing user community and continues to gain mindshare. In the future, the launch of OpenSolaris will be seen as a major landmark in the history of computing and will be viewed as a significant precursor to the runaway success of the F/OSS revolution."

"In support of Sun's commitment to free and open source software, we developed the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program to foster innovation and recognize the most interesting initiatives within open source communities worldwide," said Jim Grisanzio, community lead and OpenSolaris Governing Board member, Sun. "The winning projects we have chosen demonstrate extraordinary creativity and usefulness to the community."

The OpenSolaris Community made two types of awards: