14 DAY TRIAL // The project leader of the Android-x86 project is saying that Kickstarter’s Console OS is just a rip-off being sold as new and innovative.
Android-x86 is a port of the Android operating system for the x86 platform that brings the entire mobile experience to the desktop. It might seem weird to run on your desktop the same thing you have on your phone, but it’s a great OS for regular users. It’s really light and can run on older hardware.
There are already a couple of other distros based on Android-x86. We actually wrote about one of them today. It’s called Remix OS, and its makers give credit to the developers of the base.
The same doesn’t happen for Console OS, and the developers of Android-x86 are saying that their code has been lifted without credit. Furthermore, the Console OS backers on Kickstarter are being scammed.
Console OS has been funded on Kickstarter
The developers of Console OS went to Kickstarter and about 80,000 dollars in a successful campaign. The initial launch date for the new OS was December 2014, but that passed a long time ago. Now some new information comes to light about the origins of this OS.
“I really have no time to check what Christopher Price and his crappy Console OS did recently. But I'm getting more and more private requests to ask me to stop him from stealing the Android-x86 effort. So as the project leader of the Android-x86 project, I think I need to do something,” wrote Chih-Wei Huang in a forum post.
He went on to explain that the guy in charge of the Console OS Project, Christopher Price, is actually fooling users, and he doesn’t have anything concrete, with the exception of the code taken from Android-X86.
The truth is that Android-X86 uses a license allowing anyone to take the code, and that’s not really the problem, but Christopher Price uploaded the code to GitHub and labeled it as something new. Chih-Wei Huang says that it’s Android-X86 with just a few minor commits.
Chih-Wei Huang’s post is pretty long but advises people that the Kickstarter project is most likely a bust and that Console OS is a scam. You can read the entire thing on Google Groups and make some popcorn as well; it’s quite a read.
Update: We were contacted by the Console OS team and they want to share their side of the story, which is different from what Chih-Wei Huang has explained. A new article will be published tomorrow.