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by sigmar 3553 days ago
The intellectual property section towards the end of the rules[1] seems noteworthy (though not unexpected).

>Each Entrant hereby grants Sponsor and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free license to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, export, license, exploit, promote, reproduce, make available, publicly display, publicly perform, create derivative works of, and otherwise exercise all intellectual property and other rights in and to any concepts, works, inventions, information, designs, programs, or software that Entrant or his or her Entrant Team develop or submit in connection with the Competition or the creation of the Socialbot, including any of the foregoing included or described in any Technical Article or other materials provided to Sponsor.

[1] https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize/contest-rules

2 comments

At least it's non-exclusive so they can take their tech elsewhere too.
> create derivative works of

Interesting, seems like they could publish your source under whatever license they chose. It might be in their interest to use a BSD/GPL/MIT license to continue community contribution. Though it might hurt your ability to turn that software into a Conversational-AI-aaS business.

So if you have something capable of winning this prize, how much more would it be worth to keep it?
Whatever OpenAI might offer, which I'd argue is a better steward of the resulting knowledge than Amazon.

If OpenAI would release an Alexa hardware competitor, I'd pay whatever it cost in a heartbeat, as I'd know it was being used to increase the data corpus of a non-profit versus Amazon.

What about Mycroft?

https://mycroft.ai/

Non-profit?
Of course, it depends. How well can you market/sell it? How much is winning this prize worth to you in future job earnings?