The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Technical contest for students to come up with real life solutions

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 20, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Technical contest for students to come up with real life solutions

M. Dinesh Varma

Sun Microsystems’ initiative offers them freedom to work across technologies

‘Code for Freedom’ is aimed at involving students of at least 100 recognised colleges, universities
Participants will be given a suite of 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 it is in the domain of web or server applications.

“They will learn real life computer programs, freedom to change real life source code and freedom to make a difference to real life problems.”

By providing an early exposure to the thrills and challenges unique to open source, Sun expects to enlist more youth in the developer communities for open source initiatives.

According to the company spokesman, the exercise is unprecedented in nature as well as scale, as it not only prepares students to become professional developers but also offers them the freedom to work across a wide range of technologies.

Precipitating a shift

On a larger dimension, Sun will be precipitating a shift from the ‘passive information age’ to the proactive ‘participation age.’ Though substantial numbers of Indian students join the developer community, their contribution rates have been low. This student-driven project will seek to correct the imbalance.

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