So so few/high prizes?

[Clemens Eisserer]

Hi Richard,

Thanks a lot for your fast answer.

> Thanks for your note. The issue with prizes is that it turns out to be
> quite costly to administer them. We want to encourage contributions, but we
> also can't afford to spend large amounts of engineering or marketing time
> judging, evaluating, answering questions, managing the process, paying the
> awards, etc. We felt that this structure was a good compromise between
> wanting to reward the community and get some great things going, while
> keeping the cost to administer the program within bounds we could afford.

Well I already thought that this would be the case - however - if the
outcome with the 7x25.000$ approach is 1.0 and with 20x5000$ its 2.5
(just relative numbers) the 50.000$ are well spent on administration
tasks ;)
Its just my opinion that few and high prices will lead to some shining
(in future unmaintained) projects and many frustrated, disappointed
groundwork contributors.
I don't know whats the intention of the project is (maybe Sun _is_
seeking for such shiny projects to show how cool stuff comes out of
opensourcing java), so I can't comment wether this is bador good -
however I can imaging that openjdk would benefit more from loyal
contributors which stay here even if money is gone ;)

I don't think that my mail is able to change anything, and I guess
there have been many brainstorming and discussion sessions inside of
Sun.I just had to write my thoughts down.

Anyway, thanks a lot for beeing that open-source friendly, and for
doing real things (instead of blaming others to do so like big blue
did with Sun) instead of just talking about them.

lg Clemens