Just to play devil's advocate, wouldn't it make sense that members of the winning team had previously worked for Salesforce? They would have a big advantage of knowing the sort of apps Salesforce were looking for. I suppose the best counter to this would be if Salesforce disallowed previous employees from entering at all.
Also, I'm still confused at what does and doesn't constitute pre-existing code at hackathons. It's such a grey area. I think Salesforce definitely should have done a better job of addressing this before the hackathon began. As it was, it's no surprise that some teams interpreted the rule differently than others and those teams that interpreted it most loosely held the advantage.
I think it's less the fact that the individual has worked for Salesforce for 9 years, rather that the winning app was not developed for the hackathon. Heck, the product was even shown at a Meetup on Oct 8, weeks before the hackathon was announced.
Edit: just to add another layer to my response -- I had formed a team for the hackathon, but ended up not flying to SF for the hackathon (so I'm definitely not bitter about money/time spent, although we did meet several times to come up with ideas, etc.). One of the things we feared most was that some company will indeed present a polished product it had worked on for the past year, but never launched it. It's always a concern in any hackathon, and we figured it would be even a bigger one at a hackathon with a grand prize that big. HOWEVER, what's infuriating about the Salesforce hackathon is that the winning team had actually presented their product prior to the announcement of the hackathon! To me, it's very clear cut and enforceable. Although I'm not a lawyer, I think it's similar to a patent: if you are making your invention/app public, it's already in the public domain and shouldn't be given protection/eligibility to compete.
personally I don't think that it was an ex-employee was a problem. But I was at the meetup group in SF on Oct 8 where they demo'd upshot. From what I can gather, the only thing that was developed for the hackathon was making the web app, which already existed, work slightly better in a mobile browser. In the meetup I remember hearing that they had been working on upshot for something like 8 months at that point. So yeah, that's pretty jacked up.
They already have a huge advantage since they already know exactly what APIs Salesforce offers and how to use them. Most people going to the hackathon have probably never seen the Salesforce API in their life until that day. It's simply wrong to let company employees participate.
Also, I'm still confused at what does and doesn't constitute pre-existing code at hackathons. It's such a grey area. I think Salesforce definitely should have done a better job of addressing this before the hackathon began. As it was, it's no surprise that some teams interpreted the rule differently than others and those teams that interpreted it most loosely held the advantage.