Microsoft Offers Grants for Rotor Work
For the second time, Microsoft is offering grants for work on Rotor, their open source version of .NET. Grant proposals can be submitted by just about anyone for doing things such as creating educational material based on Rotor, adding experimental features to the compiler(s) and runtime, and supporting the community by maintaining branches of the source tree or helping out on the mailing list. The first sets of grants were for projects that ended back in September; there were over 40 projects that received grants of up to $25,000. A sample of the projects included using Rotor to enhance a compiler course, several studies on garbage collection, and adding support for assertions to the CIL (.NET intermediate bytecode). Most of the grants were to universities, but I did notice a couple of commercial entities on the list.
The deadline for this round of grants is January 15, so hurry on over to http://research.microsoft.com/Collaboration/University/Europe/RFP/Rotor2/RFP2.aspx to get the details. You can see the list of grants that were awarded in the first batch at http://research.microsoft.com/collaboration/university/europe/rfp/rotor/rotorProjects.aspx.
Source: .Net Journal