Today Price sent a message to backers saying he will try to refund if he could, and that he didn't know IA would be dropped.

Sure, Chris's project depended on Intel's and Huang's work too much, but that's what open source is - people putting together software products based on other people's open source code. That's literally what Ubuntu is. Mark Shuttleworth is a millionaire and Debian is still around so Mark's project didn't fail. Chris Price isn't a millionaire and all his upstreams went away, so his project did fail. Unfortunate yes, poor judgment maybe, but not intentionally malicious.

In all of this, my observation is that Chris Price has acted with integrity and honesty. Huang has acted like a spoiled child and the demand of $50k for Price to use the Android-x86 code is a disgusting insult to open source developers everywhere.

If you don't like when someone forks your open source code, which you yourself forked from somewhere else, then fuck off and don't write anything in the first place.

Android-x86 has always been an inconsistent buggy mess and could use some severe polish like ConsoleOS was bringing to the table.

The idea that Price acted in ill faith is ridiculous. He's already said he's used all the backer money, has had years of stress and hard work, and has nothing to show for it. If this was a scam, he'd have profited and gotten something out if it.

I am sad that ConsoleOS didn't work out but it's not a scam and never was.

Disclosure: I'm a ConsoleOS backer but do not participate in the community or development. I backed the project because I liked the idea of an Android gaming console at the time. I also own an Ouya. Now I use RetroPie.