Amrita bags Champion University award from Sun Microsystems

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham won the Champion University award from the Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s leading computer and network companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley, in one of the hotly contested national-level Open Source contests titled ‘Code for Freedom’.

Balakrishnan Shankar, Associate Dean, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham received the award from Ian Murdock, founder of the popular Debian GNU/Linux OS and Chief OS platform strategist, Sun Microsystems. Champion University award was presented to Amrita by the Sun Microsystems for the university with the highest number of contributions to the ‘Code for Freedom’ contest.

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham won prizes in all categories in which competitions were held under ‘Code for Freedom’.

In the Grand Prize category, Avinash Joshi (B Tech) and Rishi M Nair (BSc Computer Science), both students of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham won prizes for fixing the maximum number of bugs in OpenSolaris Operating System.

They were rewarded by an Acer laptop each. In the ‘significant contributions’ category, 16 more students from the Amrita won prizes, each one of them receiving an iPod.

The Sun Microsystems, a leading contributor to open source movement, had launched the ‘Code for Freedom’ contest to popularise open source technologies among students. The contest paved the way for students from across India to learn about open source technologies and make contributions to specific open source projects.

The contest involved students choosing to work in any one of Open Source technologies such as OpenSolaris, NetBeans, Apache Derby, etc. for making enhancements and fixing software bugs.

The prizes were awarded during Sun Tech Days, Sun’s Worldwide Developer Conference, an annual event that attracts the largest gathering of Open Source enthusiasts in the country. This year, the event was held at the International Convention Centre, Hyderabad.

Sun Tech Days gave participants an opportunity to listen to and meet with some of the brightest technology experts from around the world.

In recent times, the open source movement is emerging as the new world order in the technology sector across the world. Increasingly, open source products such as Apache Web Server, Open Office and Linux are dwarfing several well-known proprietary software products.