Much to my delight, Binpress is having a programming contest! The main page for the contest has some basic information and a teaser on the prizes. The prizes are fairly significant, with the grand prize being worth $17,000 and a total of $40,000 in prizes, mostly free services from various providers but there is a nice chunk of cash too! I love the idea of programming contests where you actually get something more than prestige, and Binpress is a very interesting service that can help programmers make some money. So, I was excited when Binpress asked me to be a judge for the contest.

Who and what is Binpress?

Binpress is described as a “web application software market”. Granted, this does not say much, but their idea is very interesting. They want to be a place where programmers can offer high-quality frameworks and libraries and actually get paid as opposed to purely posting their code to some open source repository. This allows the application developer to “Focus on your unique domain logic instead of building well factored solutions from scratch.”

For the developer selling the component, they do not need to worry about hooking into a payment engine or crafting the appropriate licensing terms. Binpress can take care of this and only takes a small commission of each sale.

[UPDATE] I was told that the commission structure was simplified a little while ago and I based my comments on some old information. So, if you saw other information on the commission structure here earlier, that is why it is no longer here 🙂

So, go and enter the contest! If you do not want to enter the contest, take a look at Binpress and see if it can help you.