Last week I blogged about Microsoft’s contest for the New Year and here’s Sun’s – a university challenge to encourage programming students to create a new application or port an existing application to the Solaris platform. The winner gets $5,000 and their university gets $100,000 to spend on Sun equipment.

There’s even a list of ideas for projects – and after just a few weeks of using the platform I agree with many of these (like a QuickTime player – Apple should have come up with one for Linux/Unix by now – after all, isn’t OS X based on Unix?).

Of course, some of the ideas are just plain laziness on the part of Sun – they should really be writing their own bug fixes and creating new device drivers, but then again, now that Solaris has become open source, maybe that’s the whole idea…