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from the now-fragging-folks-for-$25-dollars dept.
prospectacle writes:
You've probably wondered, from time to time: "How much would it cost to get someone to port the open-source graphics stack for the BCM21553 cellphone chip, to run on the BCM2835 processor that powers the Raspberry Pi, and then get it to run Quake III at a decent framerate, without needing the closed-source VPU driver?"
So you'll be relieved to learn that the answer is $10,000. Such a round and predictable figure is possible because nobody was employed to accomplish this, but instead it was offered as a bounty by the Raspberry Pi foundation, and it was recently been claimed by Simon Hall.
Leaving aside the publicity aspect of holding a competition, do you think it would have been cheaper to hire someone to do this at an hourly rate instead? When is a bounty (likely to be) better than a wage, to get something developed?
NCommander adds: This is, to my knowledge, the first time an ARM GPU has an open source driver able to run openarena. The article or blog isn't clear if this is running through X or talking to the framebuffer directly, but in either case, a huge win for the RPi guys in getting closer to a fully opensource system.
NCommander also adds: Proven wrong, the ARM Mali GPU family has open drivers which run openarena no problem. Here's hoping for a more open GPU drivers in the future.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by unitron on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:25PM
...over paying someone by the hour, even if the money comes out the same, is publicity.
At least if you do it right.
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 1) by KilroySmith on Tuesday April 01 2014, @07:15PM
...over paying someone by the hour, is you only have to pay if the result meets the requirements. The management overhead is absurdly lower, as is the risk of failure.