Innovation Awards

Awards Program

NOTE: This project is no longer active because the work is complete. The pages remain for historical records. Mailing list archives can be found here and here. Leaders who ran the project can be found here. To restart this project, review the Collective Life Cycle Instructions. The Awards Program was sponsored by the Advocacy Community Group.

The 2008 Winners Are Announced!

On December 5th, 2007, Sun announced its first annual Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program. The OpenSolaris community was one of six open source communities that was given funds to be used to foster innovation and recognize some of the most interesting initiatives and contributions within the community.

Sun Announces Winners of OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards

Some of our winners were honored in person at the keynote address at Sun Tech Days in Sao Paulo, Brazil on 29 September. One had this reaction:

"It was a very, very nice the ceremony in Sun Tech Days!! Really great! I will put my checks on the wall... ;-)"

[Winners received poster-sized replicas of their checks.]

Listen to interviews with winners: Sun Honors Community Awards Winners

OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards - Contest Winners

In June, 2005, Sun Microsystems took the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement by surprise when they published the source code of Solaris - long considered the company's crown jewel - whose technical features, legendary stability and standards compliance is the "gold standard" for other Operating Systems (developers) to emulate. Initially there was a lot of scepticism and many predicted that Sun would never open up the latest/greatest technical gems like the ZFS file system and DTrace. The sceptics were proven wrong - and the OpenSolaris project is now over 3 years old, has a healthy and growing user community and continues to gain mind share. I am convinced that in the future, when a timeline depicting the history of computing is drawn, that the launch of OpenSolaris will be seen as a major "tick" on that timeline and will be viewed as the most significant event for 2005 and a precursor to the runaway success of the F/OSS revolution.

- Grand Prize Winner Al Hopper

Undergraduate Student Research Grant Recipients

The OpenSolaris Undergraduate Student Research Grant Program is intended to build working relationships between the OpenSolaris community and colleges, faculty, and students. We hope the OpenSolaris community will get involved in monitoring these grants and mentoring these grant recipients. We need community members to review monthly progress reports, for example. If you have a particular interest in one of these projects, please post a note to the awards-program forum.