(InfoWorld) - Microsoft plans to start testing a new education PC called IQ PC and an education channel on its MSN portal in India next month.

The India launch of the IQ PC and education channel will be the first worldwide. It is part of Microsoft's "Unlimited Potential" program, which aims to use technology to increase the reach of education, said a spokeswoman for Microsoft India on Wednesday.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the Unlimited Potential program in April.

The new education PC, which is a combination of online and offline content, is likely to be priced at about Indian Rupees 21,000 ($513). It runs on a Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processor, and comes bundled with software from both Microsoft and local partners offering educational software.

Microsoft also announced Wednesday the launch of the MSN IQ Beta Education Channel, which will be a repository of educational and "edutainment" content. Students will have access online to curriculum, tutoring, competitive exam coaching, entertainment, references and counseling, the company said.

Students will be able to access the education channel through the IQ PC and from shared PCs at Internet cafes, the spokeswoman said.

Microsoft has partnered with Indian PC makers Zenith Computers of Mumbai and Wipro of Bangalore. Selecting AMD as a partner for the pilot program was only coincidental and Microsoft is also working with Intel Corp. on other similar initiatives, the spokeswoman said.

"There is a lot more coming in this area from Microsoft," the spokeswoman said. For example, the company has already trained over 100,000 teachers in India on using computers in education through its Project Shiksha, she said.

Microsoft Research in Bangalore is also working on technologies that will make computers more accessible and affordable to students, and has developed a technology called MultiPoint that allows several computer mice to be used with a PC simultaneously. This technology is targeted at schools in India and other countries that cannot afford to give each student a PC.

The concept of the IQ PC has been researched extensively by Microsoft, but the company plans to run test programs of the PC and the MSN Education Channel first in Bangalore and Pune, the spokeswoman said. The country-wide roll out will be in November.

"Our focus is on making IT accessible, and affordable, and also relevant by offering content and services relevant to the local requirements," the spokeswoman said.

The IQ PC is not cheap by Indian standards. A number of entry-level PCs are less expensive. However, Microsoft holds that the price will be attractive because of the software, Internet connectivity and other tools and services bundled with the product.

(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems on Wednesday will begin donating its Solaris clustering code to the open-source community, the latest move in the company's ongoing strategy to eventually make all of its software freely available.

It has been more than two years since Sun released OpenSolaris, an open-source version of its Solaris 10 Unix operating system. Since June 2005, the vendor has made other pieces of its software freely available, notably its core Java platform starting in November of last year. Sun hopes opening up its software will enable its products to enter new markets and lead to more customers for its servers, storage, and paid support services.

Known as Open High Availability Cluster, Sun will release its Solaris Cluster source code over the next 18 months through the High Availability (HA) Clusters community on the OpenSolaris Web site. Developers can use the code to help them build clustered and high-availability applications and services.

Sun will make the clustering source code available under its own open-source license, CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), said Paul Steeves, director of Solaris marketing at Sun. There are no plans to also provide the code under the GNU general public license (GPL) as Sun did with Java. That situation might change, if, as rumored, Sun decides to also provide OpenSolaris under GPLv3. The third version of the GPL is due to be finalized later this week. OpenSolaris is currently offered under CDDL.

Sun will make three major contributions to the clustering code, according to Steeves.

The first donation, due out this week, is focused on application modules or agents that allow open-source or commercial applications to become highly available in a clustered environment. Sun will make the code available for 24 of the high-availability agents it offers with its commercially available Solaris Cluster software. Among the agents are modules for Sun's Solaris Containers virtualization technology, BEA Systems' WebLogic application server and the open-source PostgreSQL database.

"There are a couple of agents we need to work through, that have encumbrances," Steeves said, where Sun doesn't hold enough rights to release the code under CDDL. These modules include agents for Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology, Sybase's database and IBM's WebSphere middleware. "We intend to release them once we've worked through the licensing," he added.

Sun will also provide documentation for the agents along with the source code for the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) so that developers can test new agents they develop, Steeves said.

Agents written using Open HA Cluster will run on Cluster Express, a binary version of Solaris Cluster, which Sun plans to release in a few weeks, Steeves said. The agents will also run on the latest version of Sun's commercial clustering product, Solaris Cluster 3.2, which debuted in January, and runs on the Solaris 9 and 10 operating systems.

The second donation will likely appear in December, Steeves said, and will include code for the Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, software that enables multisite disaster recovery.

At the end of the 18-month period, Sun will release the code for the core Solaris Cluster infrastructure along with more documentation and additional SCATE infrastructure tests.

In total, Sun will make around 2 million lines of clustering source code available, Steeves said. By comparison, Sun's donation of Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software to the open-source community represents over 6 million lines of code.

AP - When Microsoft Corp.'s worldwide student software programming competition began four years ago, many projects that emerged were "fun," according to Craig Mundie, the company's chief research and strategy officer.