Patent ID: 7401031

Claim:
A method for compensating software developers, the method comprising: (a) initiating software development contests by soliciting a plurality of developers for submissions of computer software programs; (b) receiving, as entries in the software development contests and in response to an offer to compete for allotment of potential ongoing royalties, submissions from at least one of the plurality of developers; (c) deriving a score using a computer, for each of the submissions using one or more scorecards for the at least one submission from a review of the submission that includes evaluation of compliance with specifications for the submissions by a plurality of review board members in a coding competition, wherein one or more of the review board members are each rated developers not including the developer who submitted the at least one submission; (d) selecting one or more winning entries for inclusion in a repository for distribution to the public based on the scores assigned to the submissions; (e) allotting potential ongoing royalties to one or more developers of the winning entries, the potential ongoing royalties based at least in part on potential proceeds from future distributions of the winning entries in the repository and (f) paying royalties to the one or more developers in response to the allotted royalties and proceeds from distributions of the winning entries.