Sun Gives Prizes to Teacher's Pet (Projects)

Sun has released some more details of its forthcoming Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program:

which will foster innovation and recognize some of the most interesting initiatives within Sun-sponsored open source communities worldwide. To participate in the program's first year, Sun has selected six communities: GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC. Prizes are expected to total at least $1 million (USD) a year.

Beginning in mid-January 2008, Sun and the six open source communities will announce details on how developers can participate in the individual programs. Each community will have its own contest rules and judging criteria. Prize winners will be announced in August 2008.

So, unlike Google's Summer of Code programme, which is basically to foster generic open source among young hackers, Sun's effort is targeted at its own projects. And nothing wrong with that, especially when one of them, OpenOffice.org, is a critical component of the free software stack. But Sun should't expect to get as many brownie points as Google, which, for all its faults, has been is playing the open source card very well (about which more later.)

The Java Phoenix

What a difference a year makes.

In 2006, Java was looking distinctly long in the tooth. Widely used, yes, but hardly an exciting technology. Then Sun finally adopts the GNU GPL, and - whoosh. Two clear signs of this have appeared just recently (it takes that long for these things to work their way through the system.)

The first, obviously, is the gPhone, which seems to be using Java extensively (although it's hard to tell how, just now). The other is Red Hat's agreement with Sun:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems to advance open source Java software. Red Hat has signed Sun’s broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects by all Red Hat engineers.

In addition, Red Hat has signed Sun’s OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement. This agreement gives the company access to the test suite that determines whether an implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) platform that is derived from the OpenJDK project complies with the Java SE 6 specification.

Red Hat is the first major software vendor to license the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK), in support of Java SE compatibility. To help foster innovation and advancement of the Java technology ecosystem, Red Hat will also share its developers' contributions with Sun as part of the OpenJDK community. These agreements pave the way for Red Hat to create a fully compatible, open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

OpenJDK

Free!