I've read some of the surrounding discussion, and the Android-x86 lead (Chih-Wei) very clearly laid out events from his point of view on 12 Dec:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-x86/qkWG2TwVBq...

Chih-Wei Huang wrote:

  Christopher Price continues cheating his backers
  and all others that "his team" is developing an OS which
  is much better than other competitors (including android-x86):

  http://consoleos.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/COS-competitive-061214-003.png

  However, one year and a half later, the guy just
  copied and renamed android-x86 and then claimed this
  is his amazing OS!

  All the developers of android-x86 including me
  have spent many sleepless nights to code,
  test and debug android-x86 to make it better,
  but this guy just copied it to deceive his backers.
  The dishonest actions do hurt the android-x86
  community very much.

  ...

  However, cheating the world that he is developing
  something amazing on Kickstart in 2014
  but finally just copied an open source project that
  he degraded at first (see the competitive chart on his
  site) is very immoral.

A commenter on Reddit guesses (probably correctly) that Chris Price is just using the KS money to create demand to get interest from companies who might join his project. It's obvious that $78k isn't going to get you much of a prototype, though it can get you swag & marketing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/3yslc1/androidx86_...

samandiriel wrote:

So... I would say that what the kickstarter was really for was to get capital for Price/MMV to woo companies by putting together marketing tools and some kind of proof of concept release, who would then put in the code and talent required to make ConsoleOS actually happen for the Kickstarter backers (assuming the proof of concept release wasn't good enough to meet the advertised feature set, which appears to be the case).

Perhaps originally Price thought he could just throw the IA stuff to some cheap contracted sweatshop coders and get the product to the finish line that way and then get hardware manufacturers to license it, but that died when Intel axed IA.

What it seems to boil down to is that MMV is trying to leverage the open source model to create a product they can sell to hardware manufacturers, using seed money to obtained by way of Kickstarter for marketing and extremely half assed attempts to sort of weirdly co-opt other projects such as IA and x86 and then somehow persuade coders to donate their time and energy to do all the actual work for them (which is what 'open sourcing ConsoleOS' appears to connote).