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SpecOps Labs offers $10,000 to Emulator Developers
mparaz writes "SpecOps Labs, the makers of the "David" Windows emulator previously accused of ripping off WINE, are offering $10,000 to a team who can build a Windows XP emulator in 15 days. " This whole thing reads really strangely to me.
$10K for 15 days work? I dunno, that seems rather good for one person, but one person couldn't pull it off. Water it down over a dev team and it certainly looks less attactive, but it would probably look pretty good on a resume.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
from TFI: 4. System becomes the property of SpecOpS Laboratories.
I doubt many people will be willing to build their product for them, for just $10,000 anyway
That's totally impossible. Even if you had a trillion dollars it'd be impossible.
Whoever made that offer doesn't understand software or, more likely, is trying to encourage someone to spend 15 days obfuscating WINE to deliver it to him so he can start selling and then plausibly deny it when it comes up.
This is *RIDICULOUS*. Assumming the Wine team only worked 2 hour per day, they've been at least 5 years working on it, which means 3650 hours.
Working 24 hours-a-day, 15 days would only mean 360 hours. Assumming they're not the EA-slavery kind of guys and give decent schedules (12 hours a day), that'd be 180 hours.
It's impossible, period. I say we bring the whole GNU community and investigate them.
I wonder if:
- the management already sold "their" windows emulator to somebody,
- has finally figured out that "their" windows emulator is a thinly-disguised, nearly verbatim copy of wine, in violation of the license terms,
- they need to deliver Real Soon Now,
- have very little money, and
- are trying very hard to bail themselves out before the delivery date.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They are just trying to get something for nothing, and they have a deadline. They obviously need to get this done quickly, and cannot afford to pay a developer team to write it.
Do they really think anyone in the open source community will be their personal slave for a few thousand dollars? Nice try, but anyone talented and fast enough to write this thing in 15 days doesn't need their money.
-- www.punkmusic.com
This offer is so ridiculous, why even give them publicity???
The posting makes it sound like they have a specific app in mind. You email them indicating that you're interested and they email back a challenge registration form along with further instructions (I take this to be the "details" part).
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
If you can do this in 15 days working 8 hours a day, I'll guarantee you can demand more then $83/hour in the open market.
They earlier claimed that they will come out with project David which is supposedly NOT WINE -- now they can't deliver, and they want someone else to do a proof of concept for them. Pathetic. They want to hire the best people in the Philippines but they can't even deliver even with the original team which claimed that they can do it. Now they will pay someone who thinks can come up with something which is *almost exactly* what they promise. Pathetic indeed.
It's a lot of money here in the Philippines.
Funny they get back to us, the local developers, when their president declared there's no talent here and wanted to move on to India and Vietnam for his requirements.
God damn that's a huge bonus. I had to write a Revolution emulator for a 286 in 45 minutes using Microsoft Fortran. And I got paid 50 cent for it.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
$10,000 for a finished project, eh? This doesn't strike anybody as a "complete ripoff" rather than a competition.
If, in 15 days, I write such an emulator, I will be selling it, rather than giving it away for $10,000.