iOS 7 is not jailbroken yet but if you are the one who can help to jailbreak Apple’s latest mobile operating system, you can receive a crowd funded reward. isiOS7jailbrokenyet.com is the website that has presented the idea of rewarding the one who can jailbreak iOS 7.
The site is asking people to donate money and the amount is publicly shown on their website. By the time of writing this post, the donated amounted is $2700 but considering the popularity of jailbreaks among users, it is expected that we will see a handsome figure in a few days.
“We strongly believe that users should have the freedom to control their devices. We wanted an open source jailbreak for iOS 7, giving users the capability to install what they want on their own devices and the ability to audit the code they’re using to do so” the website states. “Jailbreaking is also critical to ensuring that the disabled are able to use their mobile devices as easily as possible. So we started a prize for the first people who can do it.”
The criteria for claiming the prize is also given. The jailbreak must support iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S with the current public version iOS 7.0.4. It has to be untethered, available to the public for free and released under one of the OSI-approved licenses.
The website has also started a huge discussion on Reddit which you can find here. Some famous names are also involved in the discussion including Comex and Saurik.
Jay Freeman, the creator of Cydia who goes by the name Saurik didn’t like the idea of awarding money to the developers of the jailbreak.
“The primary problem I have with this website is that it attempts to change the dynamics from one of “people who do things that are fun to make devices more open” to one of “people who do things to win cash prizes” said Saurik on Reddit. Meanwhile, it changes the dynamics in the minds of the people contributing: normally, people contribute after the fact to the teams that built something that they found of value; under the model of this website, people contribute ahead of time, and then hope that the thing that is released works for their specific device (or even “runs on their computer”, etc.), and if it doesn’t they are kind of out of luck.
Let us know what do you think about awarding money to the jailbreak developers? Do you think it will motivate the developers?