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Anonymous Will Award $200,000 for Xbox Linux

Posted by timothy on from the that'll-keep-you-in-cereal dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "The X-box Linux Project at Sourceforge reports today that an anonymous donor will award nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the individuals responsible for the completion of a two-phased effort to run Linux on the Xbox. One can't help but wonder if this will help or hurt the community. On one hand, it is likely to generate additional interest in the project, on the other, some people may be less inclinded to share their discoveries with money on the line. Then again, getting both Money and Glory sounds pretty good."

4 of 525 comments (clear)

  1. Odds on who the anonymous donor is? by mattbee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Okay $200k is a hell of a lot; and we all know that MS loses money on every X-Box sale. A viable alternative development platform would hurt MS. This means it's somebody well-established (rich!) in the industry with a score to settle with Microsoft? Or a games company that wants to open up development for what I understand is a cheap PC platform without paying MS tax? Maybe even a potential coup by Sony or Nintendo? Completely intriguing; maybe we could have a sweepstake on who we think this anonymous donor is...

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  2. This will hurt Open Source developers by kirkb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Right now, "underground" work on consoles is fairly open. Whenever "closed" hardware and firmware gets reverse-engineered, the results are typically documented and shared among like-minded developers. Won't the $200K reward encourage greedy developers to hide their work and end up reducing the amount of sharing that goes on? In the end, this would hinder efforts to open up the Xbox. I wouldn't be suprised if MS was behind this "reward" :)

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  3. Big money to be made by hendridm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And as soon as you submit your code, you see it on KaZaa the next day with the file description, "The check is in the mail"...

  4. Re:Is Microsoft Behind This? by Erasmus+Darwin · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "Note that to get the full money, you have to make a copy of Linux that will run on an UNMODIFIED BOX. This would spurr sales, and give them a bigger installed base, but would still MAKR PIRACY HARD because there is no modchip."

    Harder? I think it would make piracy easier, as the same techniques used to run Linux on an unchipped box could be used to make games run on an unchipped box. Yes, individual games may have copy protection, but that can be bypassed on a game-by-game basis, which is still easier than chipping Xboxes on a box-by-box basis (and still potentially dealing with copy protection).

    We saw this scenario with the Dreamcast. As soon as people were able to get away with just burning games to disc (without risking performing tricky modifications to their system), piracy took off.