Well, we thought that Sun’s Legal Beagles were still crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s, but there it was on my Eee screen on the top deck of the 44 bus this evening – Sun’s PR announcing that their 1 million US dollar prize money is now officially in play. There will be a follow-up PR from OpenOffice.org in the morning giving more details on the contest.

I’ve blogged before on the agonies we went through trying to come up with the most attractive proposition for the OpenOffice.org community. In the end we went for the loosest possible guidelines about the sort of contributions we would like to encourage. They aren’t restrictive in any way – if we get lots of good entries in one category and none in another, then that’s how we’ll allocate the awards.

There are three big awards:

• Gold Awards for “outstanding achievement in advancing the OpenOffice.org Community or product”
• Silver Awards for “significant achievement” and
• Bronze Awards for “substantial contributions”

Below this, we are also recognising ‘Meritorious’ entries. If you make a contribution that we use, then we want to recognise your contribution.

Thanks to Sun’s generosity, we are able to back these awards with substantial cash awards. For legal reasons, Sun can only pay these to entrants from specified countries/states. If you’re an eligible prize winner, the prizes themselves could be very lucrative indeed.

We’re putting the bulk of the prize money – 150,000 USD – towards the big awards: a Silver will be worth twice the value of a Bronze; a Gold three times the value of a Bronze.

Three categories for “the year of 3″.

The remaining 25,000 USD will go to recognise meritorious entries, to a maximum of 5,000 USD per award.

This is serious money, and we are serious about using it to make OpenOffice.org a better product than ever; better known in the marketplace; better supported and better promoted by a re-invigorated Community.

Please go to the web page and read the small print. The contest is open to any Community member – go for it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 10:43 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.