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Port Mozilla, Collect $3696
An anonymous reader writes "The goal of the AmiZilla effort is to raise such an obscene/huge amount of money to give away to the first programmer/team that can port Mozilla to Amiga that Amiga programmers will be falling over themselves getting this application coded in record time.
The booty currently stands at $3696. Parties interested in making some extra cash to pay off student loans/go on a wild bender can find more infomation here."
Than coded fast. Code that is cranked out in record time ususally isn't efficient or stable. How do you verify that the winning code contains no major bugs?
My rights don't need management.
Nothing like cold hard cash to get someones attention. This isn't "pay off the mortgage" kind of money, but better than a poke in the eye with a stick.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
If the port should take four man-weeks to do, that works out to about $23 dollars per hour. Somehow I think they're going to need to collect more bounty before developers would "fall all over themselves" for the task.
That said, if I had extra cash, I'd offer bounties for small programming tasks. My home life doesn't afford enough hacking time to do all of the ideas I write down, and I would love to parcel them out for a hobby-sized bounty to students or other junior coders who also want to use it as a learning opportunity.
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Would Moz even be able to run on an 8 mhz Amiga 500.
You overclocked yours? 1337!
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
The newest Amigas are AmigaOnes, 800Mhz G4 boxes
Your comment is the equivalent of "It's good to see the Windows community as fanatical as ever, would mozilla even run on a 16Mhz 386" or "Would QuarkXPress even run on an 8Mhz Mac Plus"
Mind you, the AmigaOne, having been out nearly a year now, still doesn't have an OS written for it.
I hear after Mozilla is ported, someone will be working on getting networking going for it.
I have contacted Bill already about this some weeks ago and suggested that it may be better to port either Webcore or GRE to Amiga. Here an excerpt of my email. I think it's quite illusionary requesting a port of Mozilla to Amiga specially now where the entire roadmap of Mozilla changes. Read on.
/A N-2003-05-00184-DE.html
/
----
Hello,
I don't know if you are the person responsible for the
http://www.discreetfx.com/AmiZilla.html
I would like to contact you because I think there are better ways to help the Amiga getting a good Webbrowser. There was a german Article about this on www.amiga-news.de which I have read and replied to.
http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/comments/thread
Message 18 and 21. Sorry It's written in german Language so you may need to translate it using babelfish. I think you will understand it and the
contents of it.
But here a little summary.
I used to be a member of the Amiga community from 1984 - 1996 and left for Linux. I am following the Mozilla development process for various years now, contributed to it with bugreports and some minor patches, then went over to support the GALEON people.
My personal opinion is that porting Mozilla is a wrong way to go because of complexity and the required maintainership.
The mozilla approach was always criticised by many people of the open source community because of it's bloat. e.g. it's an entire development
plattform (basically a whole os and widgetset) that was also the reason why browser such as galeon, skipstone, epiphany or k-melon showed up,
they all used the embedded mozilla component and used their native window which fits pleasingly into the environment what many people simply wanted was a fast webbrowser which either fits into their desktop environment either GNOME or KDE.
Over the time the SAFARI people showed up and they have decided to take the KHTML component from KDE (supports DOM, CSS1 and CSS2, HTML4, JS,
SSL and so on), they ripped the library out of KDE, wrote a wrapper around it and called it webcore:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webco re
the kde people then got told about this after safari got released and the safari and kde people are now working on one unified component e.g.
2 teams are working on one library, they are now up to separate the backend from the engine so you can simply take the library and have it used on whatever plattform you like. The link above shows you an old version of the webcore, it's not the same as they are using now.
During the time Safarit was announced the Mozilla people got heavily pissed off and decided to change their entire roadmap because they
finally realized that XUL (their widgetset) and their way of doing things wasn't attractive to the public thus their new roadmap is to create a separate suite the email client and then the webclient (in the means of phoenix (firebird)). they are also working now to separate the
frontend from the backend and thus they work on the GRE component called Gecko Runtime Environment which offers alternative browser to use a
light library instead the requirement to install the whole mozilla stuff.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/GRE.ht ml
------------------
The point is, that I think it would be better to work together with one of these two teams either the KHTML team or the GRE team and have these
libraries ported to the Amiga rather than porting the entire mozilla project. The problems with Mozilla port could be various. On the one hand is that you need to deal with the Maintainers of mozilla. A lot of individual people that you need to explain why you want to have Amiga support in it and then the various complex problems that may show up. I know from various developers who tried to port Mozilla to GTK2+ plattform that this caused an neverending flame wether they go Pango (for fontrendering, language and AA) o
and then fell to the floor laughing uncontrolable because i found what i was looking for (its in the FAQ):
:DD
Q: What will be the requirements and the minimum spec for the Amiga version.
A: Well that will depend a lot on the programming team that tackles the port and their skillset but the spec I would like to see is Amiga OS 3.9 and above and/or WinUAE/Amiga Forever/Amithlon/AROS/MorphOS. 68030+ CPU, faster the better, 24 bit Graphics card, 32MB of RAM. I would also like the coders to try hard to make it work with AGA.
get it ! get it ! they are talking about the original amiga series, not the new one with the 600mhz PPC !
mozilla isnt even running lag free on my dual P3 with 512mb ram omg omg this is so over the top
$3676? Hmmm....
/. for insipring your creative genius to aforementioned experiments.
$40 to build a shocking Xbox controller.
$100 to buy a Dremel Powertool to explode Steve Miller Cds to infinity
$300 emergeny room visit to have a RN look at your electrical burns on your hands and to pull CD shards out of your ass.
$3236 To start litigation against
I just graduated CMU with a degree in CS, I'd take a $10 an hour job if I could find one.
The problem with this thing is that second place gets mo money. So if you coded for 150 hours and someone else finishes, then you got paid 0$/hr. To me, this is unacceptable because I always end up getting shafted like that.
God spoke to me
No offense, but this would pay for about 10 days of a junior developer's time.
And much money do the guys porting Mozilla to other platforms receive?
This is open source. Of course, the amount of money isn't going to attract someone who is looking to do programming for commercial gain, but I don't see that anyone is claiming it is. $4000 is a lot more than the $0 that is up for offer by default on open source projects.
The idea is that if someone is perhaps tempted to port it (be it for fun, or whatever else drives people to write software for free), then the cash is a little extra incentive.
What do you call amigaos 4.0?
"vaporware"
Or make even more people happy - somebody please port Firebird/Phoenix to Mac OS9. There are a ton of us who have not made the jump to OS X, and I for one have gotten to really like Phoenix on my work pc. The last Mozilla port to the old mac is 1.2.1 from last December. I feel abandoned.
-Jetset
-I can't hear the forest now for all the falling trees
It's good to see someone interested in mozilla for Amiga, something that could be considered to be a standard up to date web browser.
I honestly don't know what I used on the amiga in ages past, I just remember I made the mistake of accepting some 2.x roms and could no longer do that software load of 3.x [exact version number I can not remember presently]
From what I remember, even if you had AGA or 3rd party 24 bit graphics, in my case it was a retna (sp) card, your web browsing experence was pretty limited due to the fact that the stock amiga graphics were at best 16/32/64 colors. I don't honestly remember the details, it's not like you couldn't get 4096 colors, just apparently not for things like gif or jpeg files.
Which brings another point all together, pre 68030 based machines are not really the best at web browsing unless you have a math-co. Gifs are not so bad, jpegs however are pretty slugish. This is not to say that modern amiga users don't have accelerators... this is to say such a product would only be useful to those people.
Perhaps someone wiser then I could remember the particulars, I really couldn't be bothered being nickle and dimed on my amiga, so I just went with lynx and got frustrated and went to the PC.
So issues I see with this project
1. Would browsing in 8bit color or above graphics require a specific rom set?
2. How ever are you going to find a math-co for jpeg decoding.
This is actually comming from a person who was and still is to an extent a big amiga fan. Part of the reason I had to abandon it was the simple fact that even web browsers that were made for the amiga required money from me to display properly.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
both amiga programmers will be fighting hard to get the cash.
I used to use the GCC tools on the amiga (ADE - or whatever it turned into). But then that slowly went stagnant - and it was 10x faster to cross-compile stuff on the FreeBSD/Pentium166 than to wait for the A3000/'030.
When Amiga/PPC hardware started appearing, I was keen to do some portage of unix-ish type stuff - except the PPC dev toolchain was so woeful it made me want to cry.
sigh.
Cool, but useless.
There seems to be some confusion with regard to which OSes/solutions this effort is directed at. Currently there are 4 main 68k Amiga compatible solutions DiscreetFX would like to see supported. For two first one listed below PPC native versions would be preferable:
o ryid=560
1) AmigaOS4
This is the official new AmigaOS developed for classic Amigas upgraded with PPC accelerators and new AmigaOne computers which are being sold with G3 and G4 processors.
Some of the latest but still unfinished screenshots of AmigaOS4:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?st
AmigaOne motherboards can already be bought in combination with Linux at the following dealers (AmigaOS4 will be delivered for free as soon as it is finished): http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/dealers.php
With MOL MacOS X can also already be used with this system (as well as with the Peg below):
http://www.anythingamiga.com/XEPics/x2.jpg.html
2) MorphOS
Its ABOX environment is a re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. The re-implemted Exec kernel is hosted on top of a Quark microkernel. The OS is fast and responsive and currently runs with G3 Pegasos motherboards. Interested people will have to wait for the Pegasos II, which is planned for release in September. An interesting review can be found at OSNews:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3589
3) AROS
An open source project intended as a multi-platform re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. Most of the development takes place on x86 computers. Much of the source code was used for MorphOS. http://www.aros.org/
4) UAE, Amithlon and other 68 AmigaOS emulators
AmigaOS XL: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604
Amiga Forever: http://cloanto.com/amiga/forever/
If they don't want feature complete, here is my entry:
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
fprintf(stderr, "IMPLEMENT ME: start running mozilla on the amiga\n");
return 0;
}
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
I ported the Amiga OS to run on the Dreamcast?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The 12-16 year old computer literate kids will be all over this
The 12-16 year old computer literate kids will be going "What the FUCK is an Amiga?"
"Information wants to be paid"
khtml is a rendering engine. Mozilla is an application. Porting gecko (the khtml equivalent in Mozilla) and porting kthml are about equally difficult. Possibly easier for gecko, which is designed from the ground up to be easily portable.
If you want to compare porting Mozilla to something, you'd have to compare it to porting all of the KDE widget set _plus_ khtml.
The two Amiga users left will have to split the money (and learn how to program), but $1800 or so is still quite a chunk of change. If this were 1985, they'd be able to buy a new Amiga with that kind of cash!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Eww, that furry cartoon holding the amiga beachball is kinda creeping me out.
_nfotxn
Older Geek: "Amiga". In Spanish, it means 'female friend', and...
Younger Geek: What the FUCK is a female friend?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions