Blog contest:  India ok, but Pakistan banned
By Bala Shah

Like many Indians, I subscribe to the view that the majority of Pakistani’s want peace and harmony with India.  The people are exactly the same and techies from both countries perform equally well. The only difference is the leadership.  While we have men like Manmohan Singh, they have Zardari and Musharaff. An international tech contest has now excluded Pakistan.

Sun is one of the iconic computer companies in the world.  Perhaps the jewel in its crown is programming language Java which has become the defacto standard on the internet.  Most websites and internet applications use Java in some shape or form.

In April 2009, the No. 1 database company in the world, Oracle, paid $7.4 billion to buy Sun. Oracle has 86,000 employees and Sun employs 33,000.  This Oracle/Sun combination would offer enterprise solutions to clients.

Sun launched JavaFX in 2007 and it has proved quite popular with the computer programmers.  JavaFX is a scripting language that can be used to develop rich applications on a wide range of platforms.

Sun has just released its JavaFX Ver 1.2 and is keen to let the development community know about its new features.  So, it launched a blogging contest where computer programmers could download JavaFX 1.2 and play with it.  Anyone who blogged about the new Sun product could win prizes.  The top 10 blog posts would each receive $500.  Up to 50 honorable mentions would each get a $25 Amazon Gift certificate. The winner of this Sun contest would be announced on July 31, 2009.

Only fly in the ointment?  Techgoss has learnt that while Indians have been invited to participate, Pakistanis are banned.  A check of the contest guidelines reveals the following guidelines:

“
This contest is open only to individuals who submit original testimonials and who are of majority legal age in their country, province or state of legal residence and residents of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cambodia, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, a European Union member state, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, and Venezuela. Void in Puerto Rico, Quebec and where prohibited by law.
“

Understandably,  this will cause much heartburn in Pakistan.

It just does not make sense on why Sun would allow India but not Pakistan.