Yep. Entered a port already. Most of their apps will only need a little work, or so it seems. (Maybe I just got lucky in the ones I tried..) The real trick is to run (or create and run) a basic test suite - very few OSS apps come with a comprehensive 'make test'...

To get interest in their server-class products drummed up. If I was free to choose arch, I'd be more likely to choose a ppc64 server (for vector-intensive compute tasks) after getting one free. (Or after a friend got one, etc.) Plus, its news. And not "accounting fraud" news or other bad things, but good news. Gets people talking. (Did you know Linux did well on IBMs multi-processor server offerings? I didn't..) The whole thing is like cheap (to them) targetted advertising. Both contests together are way less than a 30 second superbowl spot. And the coverage is both more targetted to their market -and- reaches more people. The basic trick to marketing is to get news agencies to do it for you..

That makes sense. Are you doing it again this year? What all is involved in porting an app? I just assumed if it compiled and ran fine then it didn't need to be ported.

yep this "contest" is a piece of cake. I had libglass done and submitted within 4 hours of the contest starting

Why are they giving away such an expensive prize just for porting an app? GCC based apps should port quite easily, or am I missing something?

Not to be mean or anything, but check here .. 3rd link down as of this posting. (And read the history - my g5 runs OSX.) Sorry..

If i had a user account on your G5 i could port something easy and win something.