I hate to support Microsoft on this one - I was actually checking the rules to see if they forbid you from dual-licensing it - but you pulled this out of context. The license only allows them to use your code to evaluate who won the contest, and use it in promotional materials. Now, the latter part is a bit murky, it seems they have a license to publish a screenshot of your solution. But nevertheless, they are not claiming ownership of your work.

The full text is below:

Other than what is set forth below, we are not claiming any ownership rights to your entry. However, by submitting your entry, you are granting us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to: (i) use, review, assess, test and otherwise analyze your entry and all its content in connection with this Contest; and (ii) feature your entry and all content in connection with the marketing, sale, or promotion of this Contest (including but not limited to internal and external sales meetings, conference presentations, tradeshows, and screen shots of the Contest entry in press releases) in all media (now known or later developed)

http://web-ngram.research.microsoft.com/spellerchallenge/Doc...

He said he stopped reading.

Which is a very good reason not to make a post on HN afterwards.

I was being facetious. I didn't really stop reading until I read this:

  understand that we cannot control the incoming information you will 
  disclose to our representatives in the course of entering, or what our
  representatives will remember about your entry. You also understand that we will 
  not restrict work assignments of representatives who have had access to your entry.
  By entering this Contest, you agree that use of informationin our representatives’
  unaided memories in the development or deployment of our products or services does
  not create liability for us under this agreement or copyright or trade secret law;

Sounds like a filthy, under-handed way of saying "we won't copy your code verbatim, but we reserve the right to copy your algorithm and not even give you credit for it".

This seems much worse that the original excerpt you posted.

What on earth? I know we all love a good MS pile-on, but if this contest weren't being run by Microsoft, it'd be an academic shared task with results to be written up and published in a workshop of some conference, probably ACL or EMNLP (which will probably still happen, actually), for no prize money and yet with most or all of the authors open-sourcing their research code anyway.

And this isn't even substantially different from putting together OSS to do the job; even GPLed code lets MSR "use, review, assess, test, and otherwise analyze" it.

EDIT: To be even clearer, the idea of a shared task, run a bit like a contest (with a validation corpus and a secret test corpus, and a designated winner at the end), is really well established in the Natural Language Processing community, and the usual expectation is that you publish at the end. When I say in my first paragraph that this "'d be an academic shared task", I'm not speculating. The remarkable thing about the MSR contest is not the publication requirement, but that they're paying out money at all.

Either that, or it might get build in one of these newfangled "start-ups". Good luck buying, for $10,000, a company that has a spellchecker better than Microsofts.

Good luck building a company around a spell-checker, no matter what level of quality, in a world where most people already have Office.

A sufficiently-smart spell-checker would be indistinguishable from a translation aide, sentiment analyzer, voice-recognition classifier, etc. Basically, whatever tech is required to make spell-checkers better has other uses than spell-checking, and those might be valuable.

A sufficiently-smart spell-checker would be indistinguishable from an artificial intelligence. A company producing one of those things would make billions, but not by selling a spell-checker.

I didn't mean it would be indistinguishable from all of those things (because it is an AGI and could act as any of those things if it wished), but rather that it would likely have to incorporate one or more of those things to spell better. I have a feeling sentiment analysis alone would be a pretty good next step for spelling/grammar-checking.

The founder of http://afterthedeadline.com/ hangs out in hn, so I think you should take this issue up with him.

And I'm guessing he received more than $10,000 from Automattic (WordPress.com) when they acquired him / his company.

http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/09/08/after-the-deadli...

Just to be clear, that's more than just a spell checker.

For word processing, sure, but Thunderbird and Swype are two examples of software that I use on a daily basis that have uses for spell checking.

I am on no universities payroll, nobody pays me to do research.

I'm no fan of Microsoft but way to quote them out of context.

. are granting us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to: (i) use, review, assess, test and otherwise analyze your entry and all its content in connection with this Contest; and (ii) feature your entry and all content in connection with the marketing, sale, or promotion of this Contest (including but not limited to internal and external sales meetings, conference presentations, tradeshows, and screen shots of the Contest entry in press releases) in all media (now known or later developed)

Unless I am misreading the terms you are only submitting a URL to a REST webservice you create:

...Once you submit the URL of your service at the evaluation web site http://spellerchallenge.com/, a job will be scheduled to call your web service and post a status update to the Challenge’s community page...

Basically it sounds like you are giving them the right to use whatever service you create for the purpose of the contest. It would be hard for them to evaluate your entry if you didn't give them the right to do so. After reading through the rest of the terms, I can't find any requirement to give them access to anything other than that webservice and, if you win, a paper describing your research (no code requirement specified in any of the submission requirements and if you don't want their money, you don't even have to write a paper to participate).

I had the same reaction, simply because if you entered the challenge and actually produced a better spell checker, you would probably have a few people other than Microsoft willing to pay a bit more than $10,000.

Now if it were a million or two, I'd totally do it.

Exactly. Give us the cow and the milk and we’ve got some awesome beans you’ll totally love.

Career-wise, a "won an international search algorithm contest by MS Research" line in your CV is worth much more than 10K.

Yeah seriously. This contest reminded me of the Netflix contest and that one landed you 1 million dollars if you won.

A million is probably still small compared to what they would make off a revolutionary algorithm (and significantly smaller than MS would make off a better spellcheck), but at least it's enough to quit your job and do what you want for a while.

10k is nothing. It's an insult to the work that would go into an improvement.

If you've already got a better algorithm, you now know it's worth at least $10,000 to Microsoft.

Debatably. This could be a talent-scouting endeavor, so the person who came up with it (and thus this and their future creations) could be worth at least 10k to MS.

Though I think it's more likely a side-goal, so I do agree. Just pointing out alternatives :)

for hackers, working on such problem is in different order of magnitude more fun than just earning money.

I agree with you up until the point where the person owning the product of your hack is Microsoft. If the result was FOSS, that would be different.

I think they only will get the license to use it without paying any royalty. You still own the product, no?

Edit: And the license is not exclusive either. This will in a way give validation to your algorithm opening more doors (if you really want to make money).

You wouldn't own their changes to it. I.e. they take what you gave them, build on it, and now they own it and not you. I imagine they are looking for a novel idea that they can own for $10k and then they will implement into Office "the Microsoft way" for about $500k+.

Well, yeah. Did you expect them to give out $10,000 just to know that somewhere in the world a better algorithm exists?

I agree that $10,000 seems rather low, but you could presumably license the algorithm to other parties. The sucky part is that it appears to apply to all applicants instead of just the winner.

However, by submitting your entry, you: are granting us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license.

They're not saying that only the winner has to grant said license, they're saying that everybody who enters has to grant said license.

It's like 99designs, except in this case, MS gets to take home all the designs instead of just the winning one.

No you don’t. That was quoted out of context. You grant them the license to evaluate the algorithm in connection with the contest and to use your algorithm for promotion in connection with the contest. This license doesn’t give Microsoft the right to use your algorithm anywhere else.

Yeah, you're right. I certainly wouldn't enter that contest.

"All your spellcheck algorithms are belong to us"