Project SunSPOT
Description:
Project SunSPOT or Sun Small Programmable Object Technology is an open community research project hosted by Sun Technologies. The project started in late 2003 when Sun Labs began to research wireless technologies. The project has evolved beyond that point and several ideas new to the market have been implemented into the Sun SPOTs, such as the Squawk Virtual Machine (which allows for wireless applications to be run on the processor without an OS). After creating the SunSPOT, Sun Technologies realized that they didn't have the time or resources to fully persue the various applications that the SunSPOT could be used for. In order to continue development and get the word out about SunSPOTs, Sun Technologies turned to the Open Source Community and began selling Sun SPOT Java Development kits. As a further step to get people interested in the project, Sun Technologies also offered an open grant program to offer free SPOTs to anyone who submitted a proposal that seemed viable to benefit Sun Technologies in some way (be it developmental, word-spreading, or to attract a long-term product consumer).
Currently there are a variety of open source projects in progress, most of which are posted in the project forums of the Project Sun SPOT website.
