The rules aren't very formal. The idea is to have fun.
The author of each "winning" work only gets the kudos (and Google page rank from our backlink) from the successful article. The perl foundation gets the money, at whatever the pound/dollar exchange rate is at that time. The idea of "good enough" is to try to find some trade off between quality of winners, and time to get winners, without having an artificial entry deadline or deciding that no entries were received that deserved to win. The intent is that the judges declare an article to be a "winner" for a category when they think it is good enough, and that it is unlikely that someone else is about to send in something better. (So that we don't inadvertently annoy someone else who has something nearly finished).
The idea of this spoofathon is to publish spoof advocacy articles online, so by entering you are deemed to have given consent for us to publish your article (with correct attribution) on the official pages here at http://www.perl.org/advocacy/spoofathon/. Copyright remains with the submitter.
I'm hoping that people will still write these things after all the rewards have reached TPF. So please don't be annoyed if you find your article is sitting next to one or more other takes on why Brainfuck is better than perl, or if we declare one or more joint winners. The principal purpose of this exercise is to have fun.
Schwern and Greg McCarroll have kindly agreed to act as judges. The purpose of judges is to maximise the amount of fun to be got from the finite amount of money. The judges decision is final (unless bribed), and their subjective sense of humour may will differ from yours (and mine). The judges are quite welcome to send back entries with suggestions on why they didn't like them, and what could be changed - after all, the aim of all this is to get the most humorous articles, not to formally find "winners".
As the entries are intended to be published online, please submit them in a format that is easy to convert (eg text, POD, well formed HTML). Many people have heard Greg's ability to read non-English words, so it's best to submit your entries in English. I see no problem in submitting an original in another language with a translation to English, and we host both, but it may turn out that this is impractical for technical reasons.
It's likely that the judges will wait a couple of weeks to gauge the level of interest. However, don't delay, as I've already seen two side splitting draft entries.