[paulbaumgart]

Thanks for pointing this out. That's a perspective on these types of competitions I've never considered, but it seems like you're exactly right:

"TopCoder also sells software licenses to use the growing body of components that have been developed in competition. Finally, TopCoder acts as an outsourcing center, allowing companies to farm out custom design and development tasks to TopCoder competitors."

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopCoder#TopCoder_as_a_business )

Sounds pretty sleazy to me.

[jacquesm]

There are good counterexamples though, for instance the netflix prize. Another decent way to go about it would be to open source the result of such a contest.