SANTA CLARA, USA: Sun Microsystems Inc., has announced the winners of the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Challenge designed to fuel innovation and community around OpenOffice.org, as the community prepares for the imminent launch of its next-generation productivity suite, OpenOffice.org 3.0.

The contest was part of Sun's million-dollar Open Source Community Innovation Challenge Program, a multi-year program supporting several Sun-sponsored open source communities.

"It has been a pleasure to contribute QATrack, which gives the OpenOffice.org Community the ability to track the qualification of the many releases being worked on," said Gold Medal winner Per Eriksson. "I look forward to future involvement with this truly innovative, global project."

News Image "In support of Sun's commitment to free and open-source software and the communities that sustain it, we developed the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program to foster innovation and community, and to recognize the most interesting initiatives within open source communities worldwide," said Louis Suarez-Potts, community development manager for OpenOffice.org at Sun. "The winners the OpenOffice.org Program Committee chose have demonstrated extraordinary creativity and collaboration, and their work has fuelled significant growth in the OpenOffice.org community. Frankly, the work is exciting and we have every hope and expectation that the contestants will continue to participate. And that was what it was all about: building the community by doing interesting work."

The six OpenOffice.org Gold Medal winners and categories include the following:

• Technical, Core - Maximilian Odendahl of Odendahl SEPT-Solution for the Notes2 project
• Technical, Core - László Németh an Independent developer and professional biologist; active in Hungarian Free Software Movement for the Hunspell project
• Technical, Core - Regina Henschel a secondary school teacher and independent developer for the "Improve numerical stability of spreadsheet functions: in Calc project
• Technical, Extensions - Dominique Archambault (Team Leader) of Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris for the odt2book project
• Technical, Extensions - Per Eriksson an independent developer for the QA Track 2.0: An Information Portal for the OpenOffice.org Community project
• Special - Daniel Naber (Team Leader) a Java technology developer from Germany for the Language Tool project
• All Silver and Bronze Medal winners, along with honorable mentions.

OpenOffice.org would like to congratulate the award winners - the Community looks forward to seeing their projects develop.

Sun is celebrating the growth of the open source community. In addition to OpenOffice.org, Sun's open source portfolio of products includes GlassFish, OpenJDK, Open Storage, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, MySQL, PostgreSQL and OpenSPARC.