The one thing that worries me about this is that since the prize is so amazing, it might encourage "cheating" if you will. If you remember the Salesforce hackathon controversy[1], the winner of the 1 million dollar prize received a good amount of criticism since the winner was a former Salesforce VP and some of the code existed before the hackathon took place. Even if the Salesforce hackathon rules didn't strictly di…
I certainly understand the concern, but I think the timeframe of this contest will serve to mitigate the problem. Three months is, in my opinion, long enough for a motivated participant to come up with an entry that could easily compete with a multi-year project.
Additionally, the openness encouraged by the competition (as a judging criteria) will allow the community time to scrutinize entries and call out any that appear to be 'cheating'.