Canonical's Charm contest commences

Canonical are looking for Juju developers to create new tools that use its service orchestration framework and is prepared to offer $10,000 to the best Charm in each of three categories. The company is looking for entries that can construct a full high-availability service stack in the "High Availability" category, can implement "big data" mining and analysis in the "Data Mining" category or can assemble monitoring infrastructure for existing services in the "Monitoring" category.

Juju should allow developers to create a reusable and duplicable configurations of services and integration so that another company could take an entry and use it to recreate the configuration on their own cloud or cluster platform. Entries must be assembled into a Juju bundle, be submitted to run on Ubuntu 12.04 and be of production quality "not a cowboy script or proof of concept". Further rules detail the requirements.

The full rules do note that all entries grant Canonical royalty-free, irrevocable licence to the work and the right to sub-license it, create derivative works from it and incorporate it into their products. Given that the rules also require the entries to be entirely open source, it is unclear why Canonical would require the granting of terms that are similar to those of a Contributor Licence Agreement.

The company is also offering joint marketing opportunities to qualifying participants with "featured application slots on ubuntu.com, joint webinars and more". The competition will run until 1 October and is open to individuals, teams, companies and organisations.

(djwm)