A hackathon is an event when programmers meet to do extreme computer programming, these events typically are a week or weekend in length. The term sprint is used to describe shorter events of a similar nature, which typically only last a single day.

= Origins =

The term hackathon itself is a compound word formed from the intellectual slang hack (technology slang) and marathon. In all known cases, a hackathon refers not simply to a time one hacks, but to a time when many hack on what they want to, how they want to - with little to no restrictions on direction or goal of the programming.

The term hackathon seems to have independently been created by both the developers of OpenBSD and the marketing team of Sun Microsystems; these usages both first happened in 1999.

= The first hackathons =

OpenBSD s apparent first use of the term referred to a cryptographic development event held in Calgary on June 4th 1999, where 10 developers came together in order to avoid legal problems caused by export regulations of cryptographic software from the United States.

For Sun, the usage referred to an event at the JavaOne conference June 15-19, 1999; there John Gage challenged attendees to write a programme in Java programming language for the new Palm V using the infrared port to communicate with other Palm users and register it on the Internet, the event was dubbed the Hackathon .

= Current usage =

The term was picked up by PHP in 2000 and from there it spread to FreeBSD in 2001.

Since its original usage, the hackathon has become more commonly associated with the OpenBSD project than with any other usage. The project holds an annual hackathon in Calgary, Alberta, Canada where as many OpenBSD developers as possible come together to work on the codebase at a more furious pace. The results of these hackathons are usually highly noticeable improvements to either a particular set of tools or hardware platform; such improvements include the radical development Pf - which had been started before a hackathon and brought to a much better quality level during the event, expanded support for the Sharp Zaurus, the development of OpenBGPd, improvements to OpenBSD s local cvs system and a large performance improvement to the system through a cleanup of the idle loop.

Companies have recently begun to use the idea of the hackathon, in which they give a day a week or month to workers in order for them to do as they wish development-wise - all results are still owned by the company, but these hackathons allow for employees to escape from their more boring regular tasks and do something that interests them.

While other organisations, including JotSpot, Atlassian, Google, Atom (standard) and Technorati, still hold hackathons, few receive the publicity and buzz accorded the annual OpenBSD hackathon. this may in part be due to the frequency and duration of the OpenBSD hackathon when compared to others.

Of note with hackathons is that they are not all done simply by inviting developers together - they take a great deal of organising and have massive finacial impact, with Theo de Raadt noting some cost 20,000 $ Canadian for hotel and equipment fees alone. Because of this, hackathons are limited in the rate by which they are occur, happening often only once a year or quarter. They also often seek external sponsors such as in April 2003, when the NLnet Foundation paid for the hotel accommodations for the OpenBSD hackathon, which had recently had it s funding project POSSE project cancelled prematurely.

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