Who said Hackathlon?!

Yesterday I got a invitation to a cool hackathlon! It seems a serious business this times, no pizza, a room for myself at a four star hotel in Cervia and about 150$ for the transportation alone. Very interesting!

IOT and marketing

The event is obviously triyng to get people and businesses on the hype train of the Internet Of Things and I can’t really blame them, I am triyng too at searching for a cool IOT project (I’m obsessed with my microwave).

The event is sponsored by an italian tech firm and Dell, you will have to use some proprietary technology but that’s it; you are not tied to a particoular stack or technology.

The rulez

Participate as a team, you need Makers (another trending word), Developers and Business developer (very odd); this is a strange call, most of the times I heard you go solo and then join a group to meet people and start with a fresh project.

A team could come with everything done and go to the beach instead? I don’t really know but it seems ok with the rules, let’s move on.

Intellectual property or “Hello EULA”

Intellectual property get a section for itself being what really is this post about.

On the website it’s not written in the rules but if you participate in the event you agree to let Commercial Sponsor Inc. to benefit from all the software and business you could came up.

Or shortly:

You lose your intellectual property.

You lose your code.

You lose your documentation.

You lose patent property.

And so on till this hidden gem:

Ciascun partecipante dichiara e garantisce che ogni progetto presentato è originale e non viola in alcun modo i diritti di proprietà, intellettuale o industriale, di terzi: a tal fine ciascun partecipante si impegna a manlevare e tenere indenne […] da qualsiasi responsabilità e/o pretesa risarcitoria eventualmente avanzata al riguardo da terzi.

Which is legalese for:

You provide everything to us and if someonelse you were not aware of has the right to sue us on the work you did and we stole from you it’s your fault.

Obviously this is not advertised as the prize of about 5000$ you could win by participating in the event/competition.

Conclusion

It’s really hard to work, manage and host an event like this and that is why you won’t see a lot of hackathlon, especially in Italy, but if you value yourself and your work you should really think twice about going to hackathlon sponsored by Commercial Sponsor Inc.¹ because they will spoil you, even if they say they will not.

So please remember you can say “I’m really sorry but I won’t come to your hackathlon.” and participate in a more ethical one next time.