OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge
On 29 January 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc., announced its sponsorship of the OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge, a contest with up to $175,000 in awards intended to encourage and reward developers working together in solving key problems, initiating new innovative projects that promote new uses for the code, developing curricula and training, and porting the OpenJDK code base to new platforms.
The Innovators' Challenge is now over.
Winners
Final projects were due on 4 August 2008, with all work done using transparent development methods and under the auspices of the OpenJDK Community.
At the conclusion of the project phase, a panel of Judges ranked the completed projects by the degree of successful completion, the technical merit of the implementation, and the value of the completed project to the community. Four projects were eligible for prizes and completed the criteria identified in their proposals.
Prizes were awarded to the winners according to the prize table defined in the Official Rules:
| GOLD: $75K | Implement XRender pipeline for Java2D | Clemens Eisserer |
| SILVER: $50K | Closures for Java | Neal Gafter |
| BRONZE: $25K | Provide date and time library from JSR-310 | Stephen Colebourne, Michael Nascimento Santos |
| BRONZE: $25K | Portable GUI backends | Roman Kennke, Mario Torre |
The winners were notified on 2 September 2008 and the results were announced publicly on 29 September 2008.
For the record, the Judges for the Challenge were: Alan Bateman, Alex Buckley, Danny Coward, Joe Darcy, Ray Gans, James Gosling, Onno Kluyt, Jim Melvin, Alex Potochkin, Phil Race, Mark Reinhold and Dmitri Trembovetski, all of whom are employees of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone who participated in the proposals and projects! Sun is very pleased with how the Challenge turned out and hopes it helps to ignite a fire of future innovation and ideas for the OpenJDK Community.
Finalists
Final proposals were due on 2 March 2008. The Judges reviewed these proposals and selected a set of seven finalists; these were announced on 17 March 2008. Here are the finalists, in the order in which their proposals were received:
| Closures for Java | Neal Gafter |
| Implement XRender pipeline for Java2D | Clemens Eisserer |
| Provide date and time library from JSR-310 | Stephen Colebourne, Michael Nascimento Santos |
| Portable GUI backends | Roman Kennke, Mario Torre |
| Virtual Machine Interface | Andrew John Hughes |
| Free Software synthesizer implemention for the OpenJDK project | Karl Helgason |
| OpenJDK on Windows | Ted Neward |
Resources
The Challenge was run in the open. Work on proposals and projects was required to be done transparently, and all entries and projects were contributed under the Sun Contributor Agreement. Discussion about the Challenge took place on the challenge-discuss (at) openjdk.org mailing list.
Here are some additional resources:
- The Sun Contributor Agreement: All project code was required to be contributed to the OpenJDK Community under the SCA.
- An FAQ: What would an OpenJDK initiative be without an FAQ? Here you'll find answers to the basic questions.
- The Official Rules: These spell out in detail how the Challenge was run.
- The mailing list: This is where all the action took place.
