At its annual China Education & Research Conference, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) along with the Ministry of Education of China, today announced the China Innovation Program for Students (CHIPS), a student development program providing mentoring and training of the world's leading open source technologies. As an extension of China's ongoing “National University Student Creativity Experiment Initiative” that helps foster the innovation and creativity of China's top university students, CHIPS builds on Sun's continued commitment to students by empowering them with the open source expertise needed to enhance their technology skills as they enter the workforce in a highly competitive and globalized economy.

“In China and countries all over the world, Sun is finding that open source technologies and the knowledge to support them are more relevant and sought after than ever before,” said Lin Lee, vice president at Global Communities at Sun. “CHIPS is an excellent and creative way to help these students learn to innovate, while mastering the open source skills needed to be competitive in today's economy.”

The program will involve an elite group of technology students from 10 universities across China that will split into three teams per university for a development project where they will leverage open source technologies over a period of six months. Each team will leverage the latest in Sun's portfolio of open source, virtual and collaborative technology solutions to build an on-line virtual collaboration site that students can use as an educational online community. Technologies include:

• Project Wonderland, a Java(TM) and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds;
• Project Darkstar, an open source software infrastructure that simplifies the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications;
• Project Sun SPOT, a Sun Labs sponsored project designed to investigate new ways to make wireless devices smarter, more secure and more capable;
• NetBeans(TM), a leading, open source development platform and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for software developers;
• OpenSolaris(TM), an open source operating systems that encourages innovation, collaboration, and the extension of OpenSolaris technology.

The best team will be flown to Sun's corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. for a one week hosted stay where they will regularly meet with Sun's industry-leading technologists for additional mentoring programs to help foster their existing projects or help innovate new ideas.

To further help students throughout the duration of the program, Sun's Campus Ambassadors will host online presentations by senior Sun engineers and quarterly live interactive sessions to answer questions, encourage discussion and share innovative ideas. Additionally, Sun engineers and researchers will be training the educators at each university to ensure that each team has the resources needed to fulfill its program charter. The following universities will be participating: Peking and Tsinghua in Beijing; Zhejiang in Hangzhou; Shanghai Jiaotong and Fudan in Shanghai ; Nanjing in Nanjing; Tianjin in Tianjin; Huazhong in Wuhan; Xi'an Jiaotong in Xi'an; and Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin.

About Sun and Open Source

Sun Microsystems made a public commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and in doing so has contributed billions of dollars as well as more code to Free Software than any other organization in the public or private sector. As well as leveraging many industry-wide open source projects, Sun has taken the unique step of opening its core software, hardware and storage technologies and sharing them as Free and open source. Sun's Open Source technologies have proven to be more cost-effective, provide greater security, and deliver enhanced accessibility for citizens.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, NetBeans, OpenSolaris and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.