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.
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:
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).
* We're aiming to ship Console OS Developer Release 1 within about 30 days of the Kickstarter’s conclusion.
* From there, we’ll use Kickstarter funds to build out support for the devices that you vote for.
* Our goal is to implement all of the features listed here over the next year
But then said this:
* We have most of Developer Release 1 done. It'll include a starter version of our user experience and should work on all 25 devices we listed in the initial supported device list.
* The Console OS Pro feature set is largely what funds will go toward (in addition to expanding device support, based largely on Kickstarter backer votes).
Nobody should have contributed to this; they never said why they needed the money or what it was for. It's ridiculous to read about them working 18 months in the shadows to get "near" developer release 1 but then promise to build out a feature set in 11 months (since they want a month to finish what they started).
19 months -> dev release 1
11 months -> undetermined device support (no formal voting!), + a big ass list of features.
I love Kick Starter, and I've received every single thing I've committed towards. But people have to be careful and pay attention to what they're getting into.
> After Christmas, we're getting back to coding, and yes - pushing to GitHub new content. We hope that this puts perspective to the situation - and why we decided to fork Android-x86 versus contribute to it.
I've been following this saga for awhile. I feel sorry for them. The best analogy is to liken it to a slow motion car wreck. The Kickstarter comments thread reads like an instructional manual on how to make your customers hate you.
The average backers perception is that most of their time is spent doing damage control for not being able to deliver on their promises by shifting the blame to Intel for stopping development of Intel-IA.
They should take ownership for fucking up. Blaming Intel is the last thing they should be doing. What does Intel have to do with it? Nothing, of course. Their dependency on Intel doing the work certainly wasn't mentioned in the Kickstarter's Risks and Challenges.
In a way I'd like to help them, but all their business decisions are just so awful that you just can't help but stand back and watch it unfold through the splayed fingers of a facepalm. I think they will somehow decline this offer, even though it will/would be a terrible mistake to turn it down.
This should be a good lesson to founders. You can't just punch up a menu of stuff you want, claim it's mostly done and then fail when the going gets tough. If you are telling the market you can deliver it, you need to be able to deliver it.
We have repeatedly said, including in emails (both before and) following this that went unresponsive to afterwards, that we wanted to collaborate and contribute. We simply were not willing to pay money up front to do so.
You will be free to take any improvements we make to Console OS on GitHub and integrate them upstream. We didn't go to all this effort to make a bunch of empty device trees, and call it a day.
If you want to discuss this further, with a path to resolving it - my door is open.
But this list is not the place to do it. Continuing to repeat the same points here, only slows my ability to lead our team to deliver - attempting to stop a legitimate fork by these means, will not succeed.
For readability for people who don't have a 15 360 X 1080 screen:
Chih-Wei,
We have repeatedly said, including in emails (both before and) following this that went unresponsive to afterwards, that we wanted to collaborate and contribute. We simply were not willing to pay money up front to do so.
You will be free to take any improvements we make to Console OS on GitHub and integrate them upstream. We didn't go to all this effort to make a bunch of empty device trees, and call it a day.
If you want to discuss this further, with a path to resolving it - my door is open.
But this list is not the place to do it. Continuing to repeat the same points here, only slows my ability to lead our team to deliver - attempting to stop a legitimate fork by these means, will not succeed.
A legitimate fork is only legitimate if the rationale for it is legitimate.
Chih-Wei is not only refuting your stated rationale, but is offering an additional 64% of your budget, to merely prove that your past statements are true. It's hard to imagine that increasing your budget by 64% would have the net effect of "slowing your ability to lead your team to deliver," if you merely do what you claimed you previously wanted to do and were prepared to do.
Since your past statements included disparaging remarks about Chih-Wei, if you fail to meet his challenge - or rationally explain why you cannot or will not rise to it - it makes you look like a libelous and incompetent sack of crap.
This sounds great, a lot of applications are already a better experience on my phone than my desktop in many ways. The notification system and DPI scaling on Android would be killer features for me in a desktop platform. And that's not to mention the number of games and other little trinket apps that are just better than web clients for banking and such.
I just hope they can find a good way to do multitasking - that's really the only feature I think is really needed to get Android usable on desktop and laptop hardware.
If the Console OS guys can't deliver then I hope this money will be made available to volunteers willing to implement these features. Some of this is stuff I'd already like to have - getting paid a bit for it would be a nice bonus. I'm sure other devs think similarly.
The only thing they have after a kickstarter where they called android-x86 and other such projects garbage and inefficient is... a fork of android-x86, where the only change is the removal of copyrights, names, and a find-replace of androidx86 -> consoleos.
> However, about a year and a half later, he released the open source on Github- and surprise, it's a forked version of Android-x86, where literally only the name has been changed.
As opposed to what? What were people expecting here?
Any of the 100 features that were promised in the kickstarter project description. In the above email thread, the Android-x86 founder is offering the ConsoleOS founder $50,000 to post the code for just 10 of those 100 features. The ConsoleOS founder is unable to do so.
Rather interesting link. Their profiles seem quite different - this Pricetopher doesn't seem to have any tech aspects, seems to have an alternate LinkedIn account, isn't as well-spoken, and has felonies on record. But both are Chris L. Price, which is a bit of a coincidence. I'd still be surprised if they turned out to be the same person.
Yeah sorry, yesterday I thought "hmm a talented sociopath could make several completely different lives.., it's the same guy!" But no, looking again, they look completely different.
It's far too easy for these projects to take the backers for a ride either through malice or sheer incompetence, with very little scope for reimbursement.
The worst part for me is this he said in kickstarter:
"These moves also allow us to ensure Console OS will always be free, via GitHub. When we sell Console OS, we plan to commit most revenue right back into open-source development. And sales of Console OS will not be in place of our GitHub distribution - it will be right alongside them."
So he might sell a fork? Wow, well that's silly.
I think the issue here is not that the project failed, but that no attempt was even made. Their repo is a clone of an open source project with the name changed and no other commits.
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.