The Hindu : Business : Sun opens war chest for Open Source developers

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Saturday, Dec 08, 2007
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Sun opens war chest for Open Source developers

Anand Parthasarathy

Announces awards totalling $1 m a year

— PHOTO: ANAND PARTHASARATHY

FUELLING INNOVATION: Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems, at the free and open source software conference in Bangalore on Friday.

BANGALORE: Sun Microsystems, the U.S.-based technology company whose product range went completely ’open’ in recent years, has announced a one million dollar fund to fuel innovation in the Open Source programming arena. And it chose — deliberately — to make this global announcement in Bangalore on Friday, on the sidelines of the annual free and open source software conference — foss.in.

“This is where so much innovation is happening,” Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer and evangelist Simon Phipps , told The Hindu,” it’s a great Open Source community out here". The fund will be divided into six chunks of about $175,000 each — war chests to ignite original ideas in six streams or communities working on Sun-created open environments: OpenSolaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice and OpenSparc.

Solaris is Sun’s own operating system, now ’opened’ up. GlassFish is an implementation of Sun’s Java Enterprise Server. Netbeans is a generic desktop Java environment. OpenJDK is the open implementation of Java. OpenOffice is Sun’s office suite. OpenSparc is aimed at Sun’s UltraSparc processor chip. Foss.in is one of India’s largest gatherings of Open Source faithfuls.The three-day tech-mela ends on Saturday.

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