It's strange that hackathons have become so high-stakes, just from the practical point that it's extremely easy to cheat and extremely hard to detect cheating. I don't want to be the "let's go back to the days when the winner got a t-shirt" guy, but it's getting ridiculous. I heard a story last week about a very substantial prize being won by a team who iterated on a previous hackathon's result without mentioning so.
It might work in the short term, but I can see talented developers getting turned off by the whole thing and not showing up at all, when it becomes clear they have no chance of winning if they stick to the rules and start from scratch. A better alternative, if someone wants to put out prizes like that, could be to announce the competition with a deadline, say 4 weeks out, and then host optional hacker spaces for the final weekend.
It might work in the short term, but I can see talented developers getting turned off by the whole thing and not showing up at all, when it becomes clear they have no chance of winning if they stick to the rules and start from scratch. A better alternative, if someone wants to put out prizes like that, could be to announce the competition with a deadline, say 4 weeks out, and then host optional hacker spaces for the final weekend.