Coins DIG

Officials from the American vendor of computers, components, software, and IT services, Sun Microsystems, have stated that the company started a new program aimed towards independent software developers. The winner of the program will receive a prize of $1 million. Companies willing to take part in the program will have to contribute to the open source software projects launched by the company.

It is important to mention that Sun's program is completely different from the one Google has launched, called Google's Sumer of Code. The latter focuses on raising the level of student involvement in the development of open source software. Sun's project, however, refers to anyone willing to join the Open Source community.

The company's contest allows all of its participants to decide the way they are going to spend their money that comes from the awards. The project developed by the nr.1 search engine, instead, develops particular guidelines for individual contributors.

Undoubtedly the method applied by Sun is very competitive, due to the fact that it provides the needed flexibility for individual projects. The flexibility is provided in order to financially fuel companies, which take part in the program, according to their goals and model of development. Communities dealing with open source receive funds from Sun Microsystems and then apply them for research or use them as a reward to loyal contributors.

Another important difference between the Sun's program and that developed by Google is that the former pays more attention to a higher number of open-source projects that have no direct connection to the company.

However, the project announced by Sun Microsystems pushes the participation of the company's personal open-source products such as OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans, and OpenOffice.org. In other words Google's programs are aimed towards a wider range of open-source communities, while the projects developed by Sun are self-oriented and it only provides a reward to the contributors dedicated to developing the company's projects.

Sun Microsystems is famous for its initiatives, which have the goal of attracting communities of developers around their personal open-source projects.