Italians would do I.T. better….
.. if they could !
Now that I’m an expat I don’t really know if laugh or cry about stories like the one my friend Fabrizio is writing me. In fact, it turns out that Google is organizing a terrific Android Developer Challenge, with total (cash) awards for 10 million dollars (!). Isn’t it a good news for all the developers looking for a great plan to change their lifes? 
Well, it’s not a good news for italian developers, actually. In fact
The Android Developer Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, and business entities. While we seek to make the Challenge open worldwide, we cannot open the Challenge to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma) because of U.S. laws. In addition, the Challenge is not open to residents of Italy or Quebec because of local restrictions.
That’s it. Local italian restrictions (I suppose the problem is in italian laws about lotteries and contests) make it too complicate for companies like Google to extend their competition to Italy. Nothing new for italians, who for the same reason were excluded some time ago from the “Sun Grid Cool Apps Developer Challenge”.
I don’t want to turn this rant in a political rant. Italian politicians are ridiculous, it’s a well known and written fact both abroad and (maybe also) in Italy.
I’ll limit myself to add this story to the others, like the one of our European Commissioner Franco Frattini who wanted to censor search engines or the recent Levi-Prodi (luckily abandoned) proposal for a blog-license.
Update: Fabrizio blogged the story, proposing also to use the number 405849595839 to track it.
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