Microsoft is sponsoring a contest that challenges developers to use Windows CE Shared Source in a real-world project, and offers Xbox 360 game console prizes. The grand prize includes the Xbox 360 console, a 34-inch HDTV, games, and accessories.
Microsoft is sponsoring a contest that challenges developers to use Windows CE Shared Source in a real-world project, and offers Xbox 360 game console prizes. The grand prize includes the Xbox 360 console, a 34-inch HDTV, games, and accessories.
“The grand prize includes the Xbox 360 console, a 34-inch HDTV, games, and accessories.” …and all rights to your creation.
Why offer the goodies, does Microsoft think people would not join a community just for their love of developing, like in the Linux/BSD/Firefox/OpenOffice worlds ?
Or do they think everyone in the world is motivated by greed, therefore they MUST hand over the goodies to get stuff in return ?
There’s plenty of times where prizes or bounties have been put forth for OSS or Free Software developers. Here’s a short list of GreedyB*****d(R)(SM)(TM)(ETC.) projects:
http://www.opensourcexperts.com/bountylist.html
http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2005-03-28.html
http://code.google.com/soc/
http://www.limewire.org/wiki/index.php?title=Bounties
http://www.gnome.org/bounties/
Look at those people “motivated by greed”.
what he was saying was that 99% of open source developers do it for FUN, not for gain
Sheez … if Microsoft hadn’t offered anything, you’d probably be complaining that a “rich, greedy company wanted to sweat poor programmers for its own profit…”
Point is: For some people, MS can’t do anything right. Even if it does the right thing.
It’s just ironic that they have launched a new service (Codeplex) and now sponsoring a contest based on open source software after they claimed it was unreliable and undependable.
Perhaps OSS isn’t that bad, after all. Otherwise, why would they bother?
First giving prizes to employees who work on Vista afterhoures, and now Microsoft is pretty much paying (or promising to pay) external developers to work with its platform.
And what’s wrong with rewarding people with tangible prizes if/when they contribute? Are GNU/OSS folks so worried that it will distract developers from their platform?