The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Contest for students to hit upon real life solutions

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 19, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Contest for students to hit upon real life solutions

M. Dinesh Varma

‘Code for Freedom’ aimed at involving students of 100 colleges and universities
Participants will be given Sun’s five
ongoing open source projects to work on

CHENNAI: The country’s tech-savvy students get a chance to turn future badge-bearers of the open source movement under a nation-wide initiative by Sun Microsystems.

Sun, an avowed open source crusader in the computing world, will engage undergraduate and graduate students in a project-based contest to come up with innovative ‘real life’ solutions, ranging from fixing bugs to delivery of enhancements.

The ‘Code for Freedom’ event, whose title derived from the independent spirit emblematic of the open source campaign, is aimed at involving students of at least 100 recognised colleges and universities.

Participants will be given a suite of Sun’s five ongoing open source projects to work on (details on http://in.sun.com/codeforfreedom).

The technology suite comprises OpenSolaris, the open source project that has generated a community of over 60,000 registered members and hundreds of active user-groups worldwide, the Java-derived OpenPortal, NetBeans, an Integrated Development Environment for software developers, Project GlassFish, an application server, and Apache Derby, an open source relational database implemented entirely in Java.

The contest, which was formally launched as part of the diamond jubilee of Indian Independence, will close on February 14.

The winners will be declared in March. Apart from laptops and iPods for the toppers, entrants are entitled to a participation certificate from Sun. “More than the attractive prizes, the singular achievement for a youngster will be for his or her solution to get accepted worldwide among developers,” says Anil Gupta, vice-president, India Engineering Centre, Sun Microsystems.

Workshops

The environment required for participation has been kept at the minimal level and involves only a personal computer with Internet access to maximise participation.

The contestants will have to test their solutions for consistency before submitting them.

Sun also proposes a series of workshops in which experts, including the company’s developers, provide guidance as the assignments begin to mature. And, if an idea is sufficiently exciting, Sun is willing to render one-to-one mentoring, says Mr. Gupta.

Importantly, the event will carry a real life edge that will enable students to easily relate to the problems laid before them, whether in the domain of web or server applications.

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