Sun believes in building student communities across the world centered on Sun's free and open source platforms. The Sun India University Program recorded a successful year of promoting the adoption of Sun's open source technologies.

Here is a round-up of the Sun India University Program activities in India from June 2007 until now.

Kudos to the ever-enthusiastic campus ambassadors and the Sun engineers who volunteered to be campus coordinators and mentors!

Exercise Your Freedom, Choose to Win!

On August 15th 2007, India's 60th Independence day, Sun India called upon the young minds of India to wake to the call of open source.

The Code for Freedom contest was targeted at getting students to participate and contribute in open source projects. This contest helped participants acquire valuable industry experience while still at college. The contest ended on 14th February, 2008.

Students contributed to OpenSolaris, NetBeans, Project GlassFish, OpenPortal, and Apache Derby projects. Prizes for the contest included laptops, iPods, USB sticks, T-shirts, and certificates.

The contest was widely publicized and was hugely popular. Over 3000 participants registered for the contest.

OpenSolaris received 119 contributions, NetBeans received 45 contributions, Apache Derby received 13 contributions, OpenPortal received one. The contest re-affirmed Sun India's status as the top contributor to Sun's open source projects.

Ian Murdock, VP of community and developer marketing and K Nageshwara Rao, Director and Site lead of India Engineering Center distributed the prizes to the Code for Freedom winners at Sun Tech Days 2008.

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus won the award for most contributions from a college. The students from this college submitted a 100 contributions! The institution received Rs.100000 worth Sun equipment.

Experience Sun's CORONA

Several colleges across India held CORONA events that introduced students to the hottest open source technologies.

The CORONA event at Assam University in April '08 by Alok Chakrabarthy and team focused on Solaris. Enthusiastic students and faculty members attended discussions on a variety of topics such as Solaris installation, ZFS, and Dtrace.

CORONA Week at SMVDU College in
Jammu and Kashmir was held between 25th–30th April by Sushant Kumar and team. The week-long event included a quiz, a programming contest, and sessions on OpenSolaris, NetBeans, and Sun SPOTs. The event was a resounding success and 35 students opted to work on Sun technologies for their summer projects.

In June 2008, IIITM-K Sun Club and Computer Association, College of Engineering organized the first ever CORONA - Sun University Day in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Despite the tight schedule of ongoing University examinations, the students and lecturers from engineering colleges in Thiruvananthapuram participated in the workshop. A total of 130 students and 5 lecturers turned up to participate and learn more about Sun's robust technologies.

The event covered demos on OpenSolaris, NetBeans, and SunSPOTs. Participants received Solaris Starter Kits and certificates.

CORONA events were also held in several other colleges such as PESIT and Acharya Institute in Bangalore, MIT in Manipal, SASTRA in Tanjavur, BEC in Bagalkot, and Pantnagar college in Uttaranchal.

Faculty Development Program

Sun India gave away 16 Niagara systems to selected Indian premier universities to drive the adoption of OpenSPARC.