I saw this post yesterday on Engadget, announcing a beta hardware release of the Neuros OSD media box. The beta is mostly – as far as I can tell – because of the state of software development on the platform. A really interesting box (as many of Neuros’ products are) – it’ll record analog audio/video, transcode same for PSPs and iPodi, play back content, etc. The development model is wild – it’s a Linux-based platform, and Neuros is offering cash money bounties for new code that will implement specific capabilities.

Before you rush to try to buy one – too late. There were 200 units available at ThinkGeek, but they are long gone. I’m not sure how quickly it happened, but getting a post on BoingBoing was, I’m sure the kiss of death (life?).

Regarding the development model – I’ve read a couple reactions that accuse Neuros of stringing along aspiring code-jockeys in order to get software on the cheap. A comment on Engadget:

Let OSS developers do the work for a few hundreds which would cost a few tentousands if the would employ some developers. The OSS developers even have to buy the hardware by themselves. Hopefully nobody will bite the bait. This will just spoil the jobmarket and value of work for professional devs.

And one from the reBang blog:

Talk to any Industrial Designer and if they have any experience they’ll probably tell you that many design competitions are a deceptive way for greedy companies to get designs at little or no cost. One competition not so long ago offered as a prize a small cash prize and a job. Oh, and all those entries sent in by designers too wet behind the ears to know better? Those concepts belonged to the company as part of their condition for entry.

and later in the post:

And so it goes without saying that when I read on Boing Boing (Link) about PVR manufacturer Neuros’ offer of cash rewards to those programmers/hackers who code features which (big surprise) help them sell more product, I thought of my design compatriots… too naive to see how they were hurting themselves and helping The Man. Instead of hiring a programmer who could use the money to pay off student loans or raise a family, Neuros offers a pittance to entice these people to do the work for what will probably be less than paying them minimum wage (with no health insurance).

I think both sets of observations miss an important point – the hacker authored code development was going to happen anyway. If a platform can be made to run somebody else’s software (and it seems sometimes, even if it can’t), pretty quickly a community of hackers precipitates out around the hardware. Think about the PSP – Sony is in some sense the anti-Neuros – every firmware release seems to have as one of it’s goals breaking user’s ability to run ‘homebrew’. And yet, somebody always seems to find a way to make the PSP run what they want it to run. Neuros is encouraging this – “here’s the hardware and a base OS/set of capabilities – go nuts”. Are they hoping to benefit from a vibrant user/hacker development community? Sure. Are they, by doing so, exploiting that community? There I’m not so convinced.

Further, it seems to me that reBang’s comparison between design competitions and Neuros is inaccurate in one important aspect. From Neuros’ Hacking for Cash rules:

2. All code must be licensed under GPL (or LGPL or GPL compatible licenses as appropriate). You are allowed to use code from other GPL projects, but please obey the wishes of the authors.

The design submissions became the property of the company sponsoring the competition. The code produced for Neuros does not become Neuros’ IP – it’s out there as usable, repurpose-able stuff. Will it run without modifications on a completely different platform? Almost certainly not. But, can it be ported, reused, and looked at with a view towards doing similar things in a wildly different environment? I think so.

Do I believe that Neuros is destined to succeed? I have no idea – there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I do think that to write them off as cynically trying to extract free code from a bunch of dupes is to ignore a sea change that’s happening in the world of ideas, creation and information.

VMWare server. I’ve been using Workstation for a while to test things – I ‘discovered’ it at a Novell ATT class more than a couple years ago – but the Server product is wonderful. I’m setting up a Win2003 server as a host that will run an NT4 server (legacy domain), at least one NetWare 6.5 server and will have horsepower left over for other things, although the other things will also run as virtual machines – I want to keep the host OS as clean as possible. I no longer have to worry about drivers for Netware, etc. and as I get more Linux literate, swapping to RH or Suse as a host OS might be a possibility.