Ganesh Hiregoudar's Weblog

CFF winners awarded at Sun Tech Days 2008

Ian Murdok, VP community and developer marketing and K Nageshwara Rao, Director and acting site lead India Engineering Center distributed the prizes to the winners.

“Code For Freedom” is a Unique contest for students which was launched in India on India' s independence day 15th August 2007 and was open till 14^th Feb 2008.

This encouraged students in any university in India to contribute code in 5 Open Source technologies namely Open Solaris. NetBeans, Apache Derby, Open Portal and Glassfish.

This contest attracted more than 2500 students who registered.

A total of 179 contributions were made.

119 contributions were made to Solaris

45 contributions were made to NetBeans

13 contributions were made to Apache Derby

2 contributions were made to Open Portal.

Three teams of students who contributed the most significant contributions to the open technologies are being awarded laptops for their contributions.

The NetBeans category of the Code for freedom contest threw a unique challenge to students in India. NetBeans is a world class IDE used by thousands of developers around the world and has a high standard of code and quality. To contribute something to NetBeans which would be useful to experienced developers was a tough proposition in front of students. Angad Singh rose to the challenge splendidly. His "Regular Expressions NetBeans module" helps NetBeans users with understanding and composing regular expressions, a power tool in programming. It is a fine example of a contribution useful to the NetBeans users, right from novices to experienced hackers.
Angad's approach in implementing the plugin deserves applause. He used the NetBeans mailing lists effectively to gather input from NetBeans users and developers and has been smart in using existing open source utilities to achieve his end goal, instead of re-inventing the wheel. Angad's plugin has also been featured on NetBeans TV.

We would like to invite Angad Singh from the Jaypee Institute of Information and technology to the stage to receive his prize.

Ashwin Bhat and Balaji Rao silently submitted 11 contributions to OpenSolaris. Although their numbers were high, it was only during the evaluation did we notice that the contributions were difficult and of high quality.  It was amazing that they did this without any guidance.

We would like to invite Ashwin Bhat and Balaji Rao from NITK Surathkal to come to the stage and receive their prize

Avinash and Rishi were determined to win the Grand Prize of Code For Freedom.
They started with simple bug fixes which fascinated them.  They went on to submit a whole bunch of contributions for some difficult bugs too.  Together, they submitted 26 contributions, which is the highest number of bugs contributed to Code for freedom by any team.

We would like to invite Avinash Joshi and Rishi Nair from Amritha Vishva Vidyapetham, Amrithapuri to come to the stage and receive their prize

Last but not the least we would like to announce the prize for the University College whose students had the maximum number of contributions to Code for freedom. Amritha Vishva Vidyapeetham, Amrithapuri wins this prize with more than 100 contributions to the contest. A lot of passion in this contest came from Prof Vipin Pavithran whose passion for Open source is visible in this great number of contributions.

We would like to Invite Dr Balakrishnan Sankar, Associate dean and Prof. Vipin Pavithran from Amritha Vishva Vidyapeetham, Amrithapuri to come and receive the prize. Their University will soon receive Sun equipment worth Rs 1 Lakh.

We would also like to announce that the 28 students have won the prize for 3 or significant contributions to Code for freedom. They will be receiving their iPod shuffles my mail soon.

The 10 early-bird contributors will also be receiving their memory stick, certificate of appreciation and a Sun T-shirt by mail.

All contributors will be receiving a certificate of appreciation and a Sun T-shirt by mail too.

Sun India university core team is very proud of this success and planning to launch this contest in upcoming academic year as well.

Also, I would like each one of you guys can contribute and win a big bucks from Sun.The 1,000, 000$ awards program is here. Be sure to let the students in your universities know.

 http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080129.2.xml

Posted at 11:41PM Feb 28, 2008 by G S Hiregoudar in India Edu  |