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For the confused, ConsoleOS was successfully funded at $78,000 on kickstarter to release a version of Android that dual boots with Windows. After a year, nothin

For the confused, ConsoleOS was successfully funded at $78,000 on kickstarter to release a version of Android that dual boots with Windows. After a year, nothing was released. The head of ConsoleOS, Chris, claimed the Intel dropping their Android project was the reason. He finally released code on github and it was just the Android-x86 project with the name changed. He claimed to have wanted to contribute significant code to the Android-x86 project but was refused and posted a single private email from a long chain as proof. From Reddit, it has come to light that Chris has orchestrated numerous other crowd funding projects that failed at best or appear to be outright scams at worst. Here, the head of Android-x86 is calling Chris on his bluff and promising to pay Chris $50,0000 if Chris posts code for just 10 of the 100 new features that were promised in the kickstarter a year ago. In the follow-ups to this request, Chris made a request to change venue for the discussion, a request to take the discussion private, and additional excuses. The head of Android-x86 stated again that no more discussion was required, just post the commits for any 10 features out of the 100 of Chris' choice publicly in the next 24 hours and get $50,000.

creamyhorror 11y ago
I've read some of the surrounding discussion, and the Android-x86 lead (Chih-Wei) very clearly laid out events from his point of view on 12 Dec: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-x86/qkWG2TwVBqs/tW1Rm9u9DAAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-x86/qkWG2TwVBq... Chih-Wei Huang wrote: Christopher Price continues cheating his backers and all others that "his team" is developing an OS which is much better than other competitors (including android-x86): http://consoleos.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/COS-competitive-061214-003.png However, one year and a half later, the guy just copied and renamed android-x86 and then claimed this is his amazing OS! All the developers of android-x86 including me have spent many sleepless nights to code, test and debug android-x86 to make it better, but this guy just copied it to deceive his backers. The dishonest actions do hurt the android-x86 community very much. ... However, cheating the world that he is developing something amazing on Kickstart in 2014 but finally just copied an open source project that he degraded at first (see the competitive chart on his site) is very immoral. A commenter on Reddit guesses (probably correctly) that Chris Price is just using the KS money to create demand to get interest from companies who might join his project. It's obvious that $78k isn't going to get you much of a prototype, though it can get you swag & marketing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/3yslc1/androidx86_offers_christopher_price_console_os/cyh1csn https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/3yslc1/androidx86_... samandiriel wrote: So... I would say that what the kickstarter was really for was to get capital for Price/MMV to woo companies by putting together marketing tools and some kind of proof of concept release, who would then put in the code and talent required to make ConsoleOS actually happen for the Kickstarter backers (assuming the proof of concept release wasn't good enough to meet the advertised feature set, which appears to be the case). Perhaps originally Price thought he could just throw the IA stuff to some cheap contracted sweatshop coders and get the product to the finish line that way and then get hardware manufacturers to license it, but that died when Intel axed IA. What it seems to boil down to is that MMV is trying to leverage the open source model to create a product they can sell to hardware manufacturers, using seed money to obtained by way of Kickstarter for marketing and extremely half assed attempts to sort of weirdly co-opt other projects such as IA and x86 and then somehow persuade coders to donate their time and energy to do all the actual work for them (which is what 'open sourcing ConsoleOS' appears to connote).
- on_and_off 11y ago
  For the curious the kickstarter campaign video is also worth a watch : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmv/console-os-dual-boot-android-remastered-for-the-pc/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmv/console-os-dual-boo... Lots of features listed on the campaign page but nothing to back it up, IMO the whole thing smells very fishy.
  - funinobu 11y ago
    AMI has a product in this area that actually works.
kazinator 11y ago
It won't be anywhere near the end of it. Scammers and trolls invariably find ways to persist through many rounds of public unmasking.

creamyhorror 11y ago

I've read some of the surrounding discussion, and the Android-x86 lead (Chih-Wei) very clearly laid out events from his point of view on 12 Dec: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-x86/qkWG2TwVBqs/tW1Rm9u9DAAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-x86/qkWG2TwVBq... Chih-Wei Huang wrote: Christopher Price continues cheating his backers and all others that "his team" is developing an OS which is much better than other competitors (including android-x86): http://consoleos.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/COS-competitive-061214-003.png However, one year and a half later, the guy just copied and renamed android-x86 and then claimed this is his amazing OS! All the developers of android-x86 including me have spent many sleepless nights to code, test and debug android-x86 to make it better, but this guy just copied it to deceive his backers. The dishonest actions do hurt the android-x86 community very much. ... However, cheating the world that he is developing something amazing on Kickstart in 2014 but finally just copied an open source project that he degraded at first (see the competitive chart on his site) is very immoral. A commenter on Reddit guesses (probably correctly) that Chris Price is just using the KS money to create demand to get interest from companies who might join his project. It's obvious that $78k isn't going to get you much of a prototype, though it can get you swag & marketing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/3yslc1/androidx86_offers_christopher_price_console_os/cyh1csn https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/3yslc1/androidx86_... samandiriel wrote: So... I would say that what the kickstarter was really for was to get capital for Price/MMV to woo companies by putting together marketing tools and some kind of proof of concept release, who would then put in the code and talent required to make ConsoleOS actually happen for the Kickstarter backers (assuming the proof of concept release wasn't good enough to meet the advertised feature set, which appears to be the case). Perhaps originally Price thought he could just throw the IA stuff to some cheap contracted sweatshop coders and get the product to the finish line that way and then get hardware manufacturers to license it, but that died when Intel axed IA. What it seems to boil down to is that MMV is trying to leverage the open source model to create a product they can sell to hardware manufacturers, using seed money to obtained by way of Kickstarter for marketing and extremely half assed attempts to sort of weirdly co-opt other projects such as IA and x86 and then somehow persuade coders to donate their time and energy to do all the actual work for them (which is what 'open sourcing ConsoleOS' appears to connote).

on_and_off 11y ago
For the curious the kickstarter campaign video is also worth a watch : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmv/console-os-dual-boot-android-remastered-for-the-pc/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmv/console-os-dual-boo... Lots of features listed on the campaign page but nothing to back it up, IMO the whole thing smells very fishy.
- funinobu 11y ago
  AMI has a product in this area that actually works.

kazinator 11y ago

It won't be anywhere near the end of it. Scammers and trolls invariably find ways to persist through many rounds of public unmasking.