Last month, when Sun Microsystems announced a $1 million grant for innovative open source projects at the Free and Open Source Software conference in Bangalore, it wasn't the sort of news that makes major headlines. Larger amounts have been committed before. IBM, for instance, is spending $1.2 million to set up an open source Software Resource Center in partnership with the Center for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune and the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. And this is only one of IBM's India projects. Sun has spent almost $2 billion supporting open source initiatives across the globe.
Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun, notes, however, that "[India] is where so much innovation is happening." The award is meant to catalyze projects in six Sun-created environments -- OpenSolaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice and OpenSparc. While the competition is not limited to open-source programmers in India, Phipps said he was announcing the award in India "because that's where I expect the greatest open source community growth to come from in the near future." <snip> http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4250#
