Sun Microsystems today unveiled a program that offers prize money as incentives for open source developers to come up with new technologies that Sun can put to use.

At an open source conference this upcoming Friday in Bangalore, Sun Microsystems will officially announce what it's calling the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program.

"I'm announcing it in India because that's where I expect the greatest open source community growth to come from in the near future," Sun's open source ombudsman Simon Phipps wrote on his personal blog on Monday. "If we can play a part in catalyzing the emergence of India as a key international open source power-house, the effect on the software industry will be huge. Not to exclude others in the region of course, so much is going on there."

The program's objective will be to create new technologies within the GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC communities. Sun and the open source communities will release further details of the program after the new year. Each individual community plans to create its own guidelines and how they judge entries, with winners to be announced in August 2008. At least $1 million in prize money will be awarded per year to start.

"Free (both as in beer as in freedom) software greatly lowers the barriers to adoption which in turn drives usage by developers and users," stated Sun community marketing manager for FOSS Barton George today. "Once you have widespread adoption, a subset of users will become your customers. If you don't have adoption, you are not relevant."

Sun has already opened up Java, Solaris and SPARC technologies, and wants to open all of its software in the future. Prior to its announcement to open Java during the 2006 JavaOne conference, Sun received a large amount of criticism for its refusal to open the technology's source code. Programmers noticed several pitfalls that were easily fixed once Sun decided to open the source code to the general public.

"We believe that FOSS is key in helping to eliminate the digital divide and bring access to technology and information to as many individuals across the world as possible," George added.

A number of Silicon Valley companies continue to adopt open source technology as an efficient method to acquire new users, especially in the Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) nations. Some financial analysts estimate BRIC nations will account for 44% of global GDP by 2050. Free or lower-priced software is easily distributed and can be fixed or modified by anyone with a coding background.