Hi, I'm a first-time poster, short-time lurker...since only last week, really. I'm finally writing because the phishing post by GW raises a lot of good points and the responses are just as intriguing. In particular, the idea that judges may develop your idea does hit on some sensitive concerns for (paranoid?) developers. Fact is, despite the non-disclosures the judges had to sign, such things are difficult to enforce - you can't easily prove the judges didn't already have the idea beforehand. The only practical way is to force them to produce proof (e.g. documentation) and that would require some sort of litigious action which basically pits the tiny individual with the guts (not to mention resources) against one of the most powerful companies in to world. Large corporations get away with a lot simply through intimidation of little guys who don't have the means or wherewithal to practically even raise such concerns.
As for patents, they most definitely favor companies and those with resources: they are immensely costly, both in time and money. Going up against a huge IP legal department with lot they can throw at trying to work around a patent application a developer puts together (and more likely than not on a shoestring) offers bad odds. As for phishing: yes, google is getting a lot of great ideas for practically nothing (from their perspective) but they've fired up the development environment to rise up to the occasion and there will, in the end, be winners who will reap the rewards for their hard work. Sure, it's not a level playing field and companies have greater resources than the humble hacker but we all knew that going in. Shoot - I didn't even encounter Android until March but I worked like a madman learning the crazy system and ended up thinking I had a chance. Well, that may have been delusional but...anyway, back to the thread. The idea of ADC is, in principle, a good one and kudos to google for being bold enough to spread a bit o their wealth to fire up the community in a positive way through such a Grand Experiment. That said, executing a contest on such a scale with such sophisticated entries is not as easy as the idea itself might have suggested. The devil's in the details and the delays are proof of how it's already complex enough that they couldn't even nail down the deadlines with their own people. You would have thought that, with the mechanisms they put in place and whatever padding (knowing how large projects invariably suffer snags and such) that they would have had a good handle on setting the deadline and sticking to it. But, perhaps it's only fair to give the entries that the developers worked so hard on, the time they deserve rather than stick to some artificial - and possibly optimistic - deadline. That said, it does become a bit worrisome: put some "creative, indispensable" ideas in front of some middle manager craving for ideas to climb up the ladder and you have to wonder how much time they're spending trying to figure out how they can massage it against their own earlier ideas to justify the argument that they've already had the idea before the contest. Very little a non-disclosure can do to prevent that. What follows could be a struggle to undermine the entry so that they can subsequently develop "their" idea...okay, now I may be getting too speculative and I have to start looking for my tin hat before writing more but, my point is, in such a large and complicated system (such as the ADC with volunteer judges from around the world), you basically have an imperfect environment trying to manifest an idealistic notion (of connecting bright developers to a potentially huge user base). Mix the two and you're going to get opportunistic middle managers on the one side and accusations, if not lawsuits, thrown up by huffy little guys. Well, let's hope it doesn't get to that... The upshot of all my babbling? Google may want to carefully study the results and reactions with a lot of internal interviews (blacklined but publicly available) before going ahead with ADC 2 later this year. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Challenge" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-challenge?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
