To win and take home either prize, your qualifying submissions must have the largest accuracy improvement verified by the Contest judges, you must share your method with (and non-exclusively license it to) Netflix, and you must describe to the world how you did it and why it works.
So, you could take the money from Netflix, use it to start your business, then license it to the other players, too.
I think people are REALLY being thrown off by the "name" and "icon" part of it. It's really obscuring the issue, and I think most readers would agree if it was reframed.
These days, graphics and the name of the program are a very large part of the program. Imagine if you tried to use photoshop, only its name was changed to Photo Editor and all of the icons were changed to something else. It would be undesirable.
So, rather than thinking of the name and icons as such, think of them as units of source code. Now, imagine an "open source" program that had a couple of source code units marked as "special". The license said you can make all the changes to the program you wanted and distribute these new versions. But they added in a clause that said if you didn't allow them to approve your changes, you couldn't use those special source code units and had to completely replace them with your own. Most of us would think that's not very "open". Imagine if gcc said if they didn't approve of your changes, you can't use main.c or the unit that parses the command-line options. So you had to make your own and hopefully get the command-line options identical (but maybe not).
Wouldn't this be silly and a bit over-controlling of them? If RMS did something like that, I'm sure there would be at least one or two comments about it. So I can see the Debian teams POV on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
To win and take home either prize, your qualifying submissions must have the largest accuracy improvement verified by the Contest judges, you must share your method with (and non-exclusively license it to) Netflix, and you must describe to the world how you did it and why it works.
So, you could take the money from Netflix, use it to start your business, then license it to the other players, too.
I think people are REALLY being thrown off by the "name" and "icon" part of it. It's really obscuring the issue, and I think most readers would agree if it was reframed. These days, graphics and the name of the program are a very large part of the program. Imagine if you tried to use photoshop, only its name was changed to Photo Editor and all of the icons were changed to something else. It would be undesirable. So, rather than thinking of the name and icons as such, think of them as units of source code. Now, imagine an "open source" program that had a couple of source code units marked as "special". The license said you can make all the changes to the program you wanted and distribute these new versions. But they added in a clause that said if you didn't allow them to approve your changes, you couldn't use those special source code units and had to completely replace them with your own. Most of us would think that's not very "open". Imagine if gcc said if they didn't approve of your changes, you can't use main.c or the unit that parses the command-line options. So you had to make your own and hopefully get the command-line options identical (but maybe not). Wouldn't this be silly and a bit over-controlling of them? If RMS did something like that, I'm sure there would be at least one or two comments about it. So I can see the Debian teams POV on this one.