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Comment by stefl | Hacker News Reader

Usually the idea of a hackathon is you make something in a short period of time. Because you can start now, before the event has started, really it's "Hey developers, please make some stuff with our API and then come and show us on the day of our conference". Or have I got this wrong?

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The part of this hackathon that concerns me is this:

> Are granting us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to: (i) use, review, assess, test, and otherwise analyze your Entry and all its content in connection with this Hackathon; and (ii) feature your Entry and all its content in connection with the marketing, sale, or promotion of this Hackathon and of Salesforce.com (including but not limited to internal and external presentations, tradeshows, and screen shots of the Hackathon Entry process in press releases) in all media (now known or later developed);

Maybe this isn't their intention, but win or lose there's nothing stopping Salesforce from taking your submission and running with it.

I don't see "distribute" or "use in contexts outside the Hackathon."

They will surely have enough info to recreate your submission, but the language above doesn't explicitly allow them to make commercial use of your submission.

Under the terms of the Rules and Regulations they explicitly say that they don't claim any right to own or use the Entry. They do get a license to use, review, asses, test, market, promote the entries in connection with the Hackathon. It generally seems it can be used for marketing but nothing really beyond that scope.

A lot of hackathons, like Node Knockout, are announced in advance. http://nodeknockout.com/

NodeKnockout may be announced in advance but entries need to be done within 48 hours : http://nodekockout.com/rules

That link errors out for me. That said, I've never seen time constraints actually enforced in any real way at a hackathon, and I suspect there's a good amount of cheating at events with decent-sized rewards. Multiply that a thousand-fold for a hackathon offering $1m.

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