The Software Carpentry project is pleased to announce the launch of its first Open Source design competition. The project's logo is attached, and details of the competition are included below. This message is being sent to you because you have expressed an interest in covering this story, or publicizing this project. If you have any questions, or do not wish to receive future notices about Software Carpentry, please contact: Dr. Gregory V. Wilson Software Carpentry Project Coordinator (416) 593 2428 gvwilson@software-carpentry.com Thanks for your interest! Greg Wilson ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Los Alamos National Laboratory Code Sourcery, LLC Software Carpentry Open Source Design Competition $100,000 in Prizes! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Software Carpentry project is pleased to announce its first Open Source design competition, with prizes totaling $100,000. Students and professionals from any country, working individually or in teams, are invited to submit design outlines for: * a platform inspection tool to replace autoconf; * a dependency management tool to replace make; * an issue tracking system to replace gnats and Bugzilla; and * a unit and regression testing harness with the functionality of XUnit, Expect, and DejaGnu. Participants may submit separate entries in one or more categories by March 31, 2000. Entries must be in English, and no more than 5000 words long; examples are available at http://www.software-carpentry.com. The competition will be judged by a panel that includes the following noted software developers, authors, and computational scientists: Stephen Adler Brookhaven National Laboratory Frank Alexander Los Alamos National Laboratory Donnie Barnes Red Hat Chris DiBona VA Linux Paul Dubois Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Andrew Hunt Pragmatic Programmers, LLC Stephen R. Lee Los Alamos National Laboratory Josh MacDonald University of California, Berkeley Brian Marick Reliable Software Technologies Doug Mewhort Queen's University Bruce Perens co-founder of the Open Source Initiative Dave Thomas Pragmatic Programmers, LLC Jon Udell author of Practical Internet Groupware Guido van Rossum inventor of Python Tom Van Vleck TransIlluminant Phil Wadler Bell Labs Scot Wingo AuctionRover The best four entries in each category will be awarded $2500, and invited to submit full designs by June 1, 2000. The best design in each category will then receive an additional $7500, while runners-up will each receive $2500. Once winning designs have been announced, $200,000 will be available through open bidding for implementation, testing, and documentation. All of the project's work will be Open Source; all tools will be written in, or scriptable with, Python, and will be required to run on both Linux and Microsoft Windows NT. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Software Carpentry project is sponsored by the Advanced Computing Laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory (http://www.acl.lanl.gov), and administered by Code Sourcery, LLC (http://www.codesourcery.com). The project's aim is to encourage adoption of better software development practices by making software tools easier to use, and by documenting design, testing, and related activities. For more information on the project, or to let us know that you intend to submit a proposal, see http://www.software-carpentry.com, or mail info@software-carpentry.com.
