If some were willing to make them, there could be userbars for winning. It'd be a nice way of having something small to show for your achievement.

Having polls for different aspects of a program is something I like

I think that some may require the project to be open sourced, but I get the feeling it'd pretty much be that way anyways

Well if there's only a poll, then Linux and Windows would have to be separate categories. I know a lot of Omni users don't have Linux installed anywhere, and as a result, Linux-only programs would get far less votes than Windows-compatible ones.

Maybe there could be separate voting polls for each OS and extra points for cross compatibility? and there would be fewer linux only then windows only mainly because its easier to recompile most linux things to run on windows then the other way around in my experience.

I thought it was the other way around? I mean I was sure that C/C++ and Java was available on every platform but .NET/VB/VC++/C# were Windows-only

I heard about weird issues with .NET on Linux, though. People were using mono to attempt running some and they would not work, from time to time.

Other than that I guess the only language compatibility issue might be if someone uses Game Maker, RPG Maker and such software to create his game, but in a contest he would lose almost all his originality points anyway because most game code would be written by somebody else (the company that created the game maker program)

Are Python and Flash available for Linux?

If anything, that will only be an issue with C/C++ and other compiled languages. For others like Java or .NET, they shouldn't have a problem with cross-compatibility.

One of the requirements of the competition would be source code release. Otherwise it would be way too much of a hassle to compile for all the different architectures out there though the author could if they wanted to.

Python is better supported on linux then windows usually and flash has support but its a lot buggier on linux then on windows