Intel Quietly Ends Its Curios Open Source Grants
Until recently Intel had an open source grant program called CURIOS that was looking for small open source groups, including startups, that are working on software technologies that could be optimized for Intel hardware.
My collaborators and I spent quite a bit of time compiling our proposal, including working within Intel's ridiculous application editable PDF with strict line and word count requirements and various mixed font sizes and spacing. It was an intentionally over-complicated hoop to jump through.
This week we found out that no one got the grant, Intel is killing the grant program after we and no doubt many other teams spend so much time working on it. They could have simply not offered the grant program a few weeks ago, but instead they waited until after we all did this work and showed our hands to them in terms of future work and commitments.
It boggles my mind that a company can be budgeting like this from week to week, they could have canceled next years grant, or scaled back the program, but they did this in the worst possible way. Adding to the issue is that the Internet appears to have been wiped clean of an indication the grant program ever existed.
If Intel wants software developers to target their hardware, treating us like this is a pretty bad way to go about it. If they ever bring it back, should we apply again in the future? We're weary of any company that might dangle a carrot in front of us and then pull the rug now.
Just another in an extremely long line of missteps by Intel.