Thanks for your support guys. It is appreciated. There is nothing particularly egregious (sp) in the "I'm pissed" (except maybe the title).
It just illustrated something that in hindsight should have been obvious - mix business and pleasure at your own risk. I'm not going to volunteer to run another GUI Olympics not because I'm "ticked off" at Davad's post but because the thread finally made me realize that Corporations can't do altruistic things and people who work for those corporations can't volunteer for things in the same areas that their jobs are in. People can't be expected to recognize altruism because smart companies don't do it.
The GUI Olympics wasn't designed as a marketing event for Stardock. It was designed as a way for Stardock to give something back to the community. It required immense amounts of volunteer time by myself and T-man. If it were a marketng event, you would have seen tons of Stardock product announcements and overt publicizing of our software on the GUI Olympics page. That would have been for starters. But anyway, the problem with volunteering for something is that you expect people to treat volunteers differently than someone being paid to do something. But people can't be expected to recognize when something is done voluntarily and when something isn't.
The GUI Olympics went off really well I think. There were apparently some issues in distribvuting the physical (shirts, etc.) prizes which will have to be looked into. I am not sure if the promise was shirts OR ODNT or shirts AND ODNT. I cna't remember where the prizes were announced to look it up. Contrary to what someone said, the rules weren't changed during the contest (I found that claim rather obnoxious). The only rule that did change was user voting and that was largely due to the sheer volume of skins (no one expected 100+ skins to be submitted).
But as a volunteer, it's just too much work and I think I'm just too much of a public target to be organizing such things. If others wnat to start up their own contest, we'll definitely support them though.
Thanks again for your support!
