Sun to sponsor $1 mn innovation awards program

SANTA CLARA, USA: Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC communities has announced details on how developers and community members can participate in the individual Open Source Community Innovation Awards programs. Each community, as outlined below, will have its own program rules and judging criteria.

In any Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, collaboration and creativity are central to its success in engaging developers and fostering innovation. The six participating communities have been involved from the beginning in the design of their programs and will also be involved in their administration. Even as the program gets underway, developers are already thinking through potential entries.

"Sun hopes that the opportunity for individual developers to be recognized for their contributions will also drive a wave of excitement and collaborative energy, which will help to power these communities toward greater innovation, participation and growth," said Simon Phipps, chief open source officer, Sun Microsystems.

GlassFish

The GlassFish Awards Program (GAP) is designed to encourage and recognize innovation and community participation with GlassFish-related activities and contributions. The project this year encourages software contributions, local activities from communities throughout the world, bug reports, blueprints or documentation and course ware. One or more prizes will be awarded to the entrants who submit the best entries as determined by the judges in accordance with the GAP Official Rules.

NetBeans

The Dreams of Reality: NetBeans Innovator's Grants will help developers bring their NetBeans-related projects to life through a grant-based work program. Open source developers can submit project ideas ranging from extra NetBeans modules, fixing Integrated Development Environment issues and bugs, documentation and adoption material, translations, to NetBeans platform applications, and more. A panel of judges selected by the NetBeans Community will select the best proposals based on criteria of importance for NetBeans, impact on NetBeans adoption, importance for the NetBeans community, completeness of the proposal and integration with existing open source projects. For more details: http://www.netbeans.org/grant.

OpenJDK

OpenJDK Community Innovator's Challenge is intended to encourage and reward developers working together in solving key problems, initiating new innovative projects that promote new uses for the code, developing curricula and training, and porting the OpenJDK code base to new platforms. The OpenJDK challenge will run in two phases: the proposal phase and the project phase. A panel of judges will choose from submitted proposals up to seven finalists to enter the project phase. The judges will rank the completed projects and all completed projects will receive an award, based on their ranking. For more information please visit http://openjdk.java.net/challenge.

OpenOffice.org

The goal of the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Award Program is to foster community development and innovation. All projects must be able to be subsequently worked on by the community and all work must be abide by OpenOffice.org's license scheme. There are six categories for this program: Technical, Community, Tools, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Documentation and Special. The OpenOffice.org Community Council is the final judge of the program and coordination of the judging will be done by a committee made up of some of its members.

OpenSolaris

The OpenSolaris Community Awards Project features a $100,000 open call for innovation and a $75,000 student research program. The awards will recognize outstanding or innovative contributions to the OpenSolaris community, with 25 $1,000 second prizes, three $15,000 first prizes, and a $30,000 grand prize. There are no categories for submission. Winning projects could include code, video, documentation or others. The student research program will fund student-professor research collaborations, focused on OpenSolaris, at universities across the globe. Visit http://opensolaris.org/os/awards/ to participate.

OpenSPARC The OpenSPARC Project Awards program will include eight categories and award amounts, ranging from $20,000 to $30,000 for the grand prize winner. The OpenSPARC awards program will be judged by a jury panel of industry experts selected from within the OpenSPARC community and representing a diverse background of expertise and experience. Prize winners will be announced in August 2008.