Is there an existing thread on this?
I have not seen this get any attention.  Having been in the computer and network industry for almost 25 years... this seems HUGE to me!  Members of my local users group agreed.

Info:
http://www.ubnt.com/challenge/

Highlights:

-- The submitted UI and Firmware must be based on the Open WRT program and must be Open Source.
-- Grand prize of $160,000 and there are 4x second prizes of $10,000.  This really is structured nicely so that multiple GUI packages can come out of this content!  So a day can come when we can have some very high quality GUI interchangeable on OpenWRT!
-- It already started... officially begins on December 17, 2008. Entries will be accepted through midnight (PST) August 17, 2009.
-- One person is allowed to submit MORE THAN one entry - so if someone can't decide which of their work they want to go - they can do alternates and both will open source!  This gives a lot of freedom to a serious entrant.
-- the platform this runs on is great.  680Mhz Atheros ar71xx, 16MB flash, 64MB of RAM.  Only $79 and they are offering free to serious people interested in the content.  I think they reasonably try to discourage people signing up just to get free hardware, which I think is legitimate.
-- OpenWRT is in good shape, a lot of work has been done on ar71xx platform!

I have a dream of a future where it is common all the shitty router interfaces from Linksys, Netgear, Trendnet, TP-Link, Planex, Belkin... that these vendors look at the several GUI options available on OpenWRT - and they just not bother with their proprietary stuff.

_________________
NON-DISCLAIMER:  I am not associated with any WiFi seller, router producer, etc.  I'm just an independent consultant who has run own business in USA since 1999.  I am also currently president of the Austin, Texas Linux Users Group.  This was our topic for last night's meeting, as Austin has a large community of website designers. The only way I earn money off OpenWRT that I know of is to sell network consulting services/advice...  I say this, as I have no direct financial interest in any of these vendors.

It is not.
Have a look at this huge list of requirements: http://www.ubnt.com/challengetemp/requirements.php
For some of the points you even have to implement backend stuff like UCI files, init scripts etc. and then only $10.000 as revenue, thats really not much. (I hope we all agree that from an economical point of view one should not assume that he wins the contest).

Also given the fact that it takes really at lot of work to build an UI from scratch. (to compare: LuCI was started nearly one year ago and is built by 2 developers and it does not yet include all of the features listed there. You can also compare with Gargoyle, X-Wrt or whatever you will notice relatively similar or sometimes longer timespans for a given set of features.)

One should be able to roughly estimate the loan for a reasonably sized developer team to meet the given requirements even if the team wins the challenge.

Thats a strange reasoning.

And especially this "great" platform can be a problem. Compare 680MHz/16MB/64MB to 200MHz /4MB/16MB which is common for many consumer routers. What I want to say is that if a developer does only focus on the target platform the UI might be working well in the end...
on 10 % of the devices supported by OpenWrt.

And last but not least.

No, thanks.

Now think again if this challenge supports your dream or how much this challenge supports FOSS at all.

If BSD, GPL or Apache license is selected by the author who submits the entry... what would prevent you from _removing this copyright notice_ in the end-user output?  Just because it is in the source code there is no legal requirement in GPL, BSD or Apache license to require that it be maintained in the visible user display of an application.

(disclaimer:  I am not a lawyer; If you have contrary information, please share.)

They just want the version submitted to their contest to say this... as soon as it is released after the contest, OpenWRT (or someone else) can put the projects into a GIT server and change whatever they want and re-release it!

(Last edited by RoundSparrow on 27 Feb 2009, 21:56)

Its either way. The point is: Its just not right to put months of development time in some software and submit it to a contest and then a company without even doing a keystroke has this product written by you with their copyright under it and if you don't win the contest as one of the 5 people who get some money then they got it all for free.

This is very different to working for some company and then submitting it as (c) the company.

Also it was only one of the aspects of my post above.

(Last edited by CyrusFF on 27 Feb 2009, 22:29)

I do not understand why it is different.  Are you from outside the USA where copyright laws differ?

Most corporations who hire contractors or employees require that the code be copyright the company that paid for the work...

The only difference I see is the payment method.  This is a contest where you are competing and could get zero income.  But that doesn't change the copyright?

While it does look like they are asking for someone else to do the heavy lifting without having to hire a bunch of 1099's to do the coding, their heart seems to be in the middle ground of making money off FOSS while also respecting it's open source. I noticed this at the bottom of the page. One would assume this would take the form of an SVN server;

Plenty of companies do that heavy lifting of creating GUI on top of OpenWRT (Netgear did with the WNR2000 router), and do NOT release it to open source!

I suspect they will do nothing more than make all the tarballs available for download.  Of course, the license would allow any willing entrant to release his own copy right away to OpenWRT on August 18, 2009 (as any competition would have missed the deadline).

The negative responses here so far make it seem like everyone thinks $160,000 is chump change.  People do work for contests all the time that don't pay off.  In this one, their work gets donated to Open Source no matter if they finish it or not.

Is everyone unclear on the fact this could be built on top of existing interface projects like X-WRT (GPL license), Gargoyle (GPL License) and LuCI (Apache license)?  Let alone the already excellent work completed by OpenWRT on the ar71xx platform.  One person with the right skills should be able to do this in a few months of labor... and  they can utilize any improvements or changes to OpenWRT up until August 17, 2009 deadline.

Of course, if you put the minimal work into it, only just adapt an existing interface with the required new features - are you likely to win the contest?  Competition can sometimes create great work out of people - give it a chance.

How about we start asking other companies to join in and add to the prizes?  Say $20,000 to boost second place, etc.  Or agrees to independently judge all the submitted entries and award $20,000 to the one they think is best.

(Last edited by RoundSparrow on 28 Feb 2009, 23:13)

I doubt that it complies with the following rules if you just extend any of the available UIs, refering to:

There is good active discussion of this contest/challenge on Slashdot (made home page with OpenWrt content!) and http://Linux.reddit.com

I have started some new threads on the Ubiquiti forum dedicated to this challenge: http://ubnt.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=20

I think it is in interest of OpenWrt to assist participants and try to steer them in ways beneficial to all users of OpenWrt.

(Last edited by RoundSparrow on 1 Mar 2009, 19:31)