There are a lot of millionares around and I don't see how my argument fails to stand based on what you said. The probability of finding ideas/code that works greatly increases when you are able to greatly increase the amount of ideas/code you have to work from.
If this was really just a friendly competition designed to enrich the community of programmers why not make all the resulting code freely available to the participants so they can be enriched? At the very least, what is the reason for stipulating that entrants give up all rights to and ownership of their intellectual material? If they weren't just trying to get something for free then why not put a clause in the legalese that would entitle an entrant to a portion of the profit that results from their input? That, to me, would be the right thing to do.
Having said that...Google isn't putting a gun to anyone's head. No one has to enter this competition. So call me a curmudgeon and be done with it.:)
As a condition of winning and redeeming a cash prize...(f) licenses to TopCoder and Google rights to all information submitted during the tournament (including rights to source code and other executables)...
It's standard legal verbage but that doesn't make it any less crappy. Google gets full ownership to the output of the best and the brightest for next to nothing which they can then use to go out and make multi-millions with. Invest a few 100k to potentially make millions for years on end into the future? Obviously playing off the throbbing egos of geeks has a pretty good ROI.
To me it's no different than focus groups...which are nothing more than employees that work for free. Some corporation, under the auspices of trying to give you a better product, gets you to show them exactly what makes you tick so they can turn around and use it to siphon away your income.
Every time I'm in a store and I see a sign that says, "Help us to make our product better, please send in your ideas!" I can't help but smirk. How forking lazy can someone get? Not only does the corp want to take my money, but they want me to figure out how to do it for them. I come up with some great idea and freely hand it over just so they can turn right around and sell it back to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is. Haven't you seen AntiTrust?
If this was really just a friendly competition designed to enrich the community of programmers why not make all the resulting code freely available to the participants so they can be enriched? At the very least, what is the reason for stipulating that entrants give up all rights to and ownership of their intellectual material? If they weren't just trying to get something for free then why not put a clause in the legalese that would entitle an entrant to a portion of the profit that results from their input? That, to me, would be the right thing to do.
Having said that...Google isn't putting a gun to anyone's head. No one has to enter this competition. So call me a curmudgeon and be done with it. :)
Granted, some do get paid. But are you prepared to make a living at it?
It's standard legal verbage but that doesn't make it any less crappy. Google gets full ownership to the output of the best and the brightest for next to nothing which they can then use to go out and make multi-millions with. Invest a few 100k to potentially make millions for years on end into the future? Obviously playing off the throbbing egos of geeks has a pretty good ROI.
To me it's no different than focus groups...which are nothing more than employees that work for free. Some corporation, under the auspices of trying to give you a better product, gets you to show them exactly what makes you tick so they can turn around and use it to siphon away your income. Every time I'm in a store and I see a sign that says, "Help us to make our product better, please send in your ideas!" I can't help but smirk. How forking lazy can someone get? Not only does the corp want to take my money, but they want me to figure out how to do it for them. I come up with some great idea and freely hand it over just so they can turn right around and sell it back to me.
No thanks.