My hope in creating the thread originally was simply to breathe new life into application development on the handset, perhaps in terms of encouraging projects to be finished, new ideas to be generated, newbies getting interested and helped to begin programming, and a bit of a lark in general. Once the prize idea was mentioned, that scuppered that plan as now we have prize funds to set up, categories to arrange, rules to stick by.. it's moved from the original idea into a proper competition, but one without any backing as yet from Nokia or Maemo to help get it off the ground.

Personally I liked the idea of the freedom away from that, I think that helps people become more creative and more likely to get involved. A newbie may be put off by the idea of trying to compete for a cash prize against an experienced Maemo developer, and people aren't going to assist or help train up the competition if it puts their chance of winning at stake. IMO it also puts more emphasis on delivering a complete and polished app in a short time frame, whereas an incomplete good idea can be explored fully, continued and finished off later after the competition. These are just opinions, but more annoying for me is that i know what should be a simple friendly comp will get bogged down in people wanting to discuss how much, who judges it, what category they should be in, why they are in some other category, how to change category, how to vote, how to change their vote, and a list of rules produced in black and white for everyone to agree on before the competition starts. It needs someone dedicated to organise all that in the shortest timeframe possible or else it'll be weeks/months, and by that time we'll be looking at installing Meego.