Stratocaster

Wednesday March 19, 2008

The Challenge of The Challenge

At FOSDEM this year, Mark Wielaard talked about how the Free Java community is first and foremost about real people doing real software - and among those real people, the folks who were in the Free Java devroom at the conference. I agreed with him when I took a few minutes to pump up the OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge to the assembled developers, only I added that the Challenge is about real people doing real software - for real money. $175,000 for OpenJDK and a cool $1 Million total for six communities participating in Sun's Open Source Community Awards initiative to be precise.

I was a little nervous at FOSDEM, with only a couple weeks until the proposal phase of the Challenge closed, and only a small handful of proposals received. I should have known better! At the last minute - well, really the last few days - an avalanche of proposals came pouring in from community members keen on contributing to the OpenJDK project and on being recognized for their contributions. An amazing 18 proposals were received, many of which were very meaty, useful and sophisticated ideas on new APIs and language features, on media, graphics, and sound components, on porting, on new languages for the JRE, and on the guts of the VM itself. It has been so gratifying to see the excitement and enthusiasm for Java technology and for the OpenJDK project. Sure we have our problems - they're well documented, and not unexpected for a project of this magnitude with so much technical and cultural history behind it. But overall, the community is coming together, working out what is important, and starting to gather momentum around some key efforts.

As a judge for the Challenge, I watched as some of Sun's best engineers evaluated these proposals and wrestled with understanding and prioritizing them. I chimed in with market perspective and ideas about how various projects might add to the relevance of OpenJDK in new markets and for new uses. The Challenge has been a challenge to judge but in the end, we picked seven finalists to continue on to the Project phase, where they will implement their proposals in the open, with the community invited to watch and participate. On August 4th the Project phase will end and the final judging round commence. Shortly after that, Sun will announce the winners, and cut some checks to some very deserving developers.

Here then are the seven finalists. Good luck, and thank you for your energy and initiative!