Bioperl: Open Source software design competition

[gvwilson@nevex.com]

[Note: this is somewhat off-topic, but given that the project is being
sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory, and is trying to build tools
that will be useful to scientists and engineers, this list seemed like an
appropriate venue.]

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; and

* a unit and regression testing harness.

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.  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 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 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
CodeSourcery, 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.



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