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[News] AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For CashANN.lu
Posted on 30-Oct-2003 10:17 GMT by Bill Panagouleas54 comments
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Over the last several months since I started the AmiZilla Project I have heard a growing whisper to allow the funds to also be available to the programmers of IBrowse, Voyager & AWeb. Most, like myself wish for a Mozilla or Firebird port to Amiga OS/MorphOS but a growing few do continue to express their love of the Amiga Browsers, which is understandable. AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash

Over the last several months since I started the AmiZilla Project I have heard a growing whisper to allow the funds to also be available to the programmers of IBrowse, Voyager & AWeb. Most, like myself wish for a Mozilla or Firebird port to Amiga OS/MorphOS but a growing few do continue to express their love of the Amiga Browsers, which is understandable. So today unless the current donators to the AmiZilla Project mind I am extending the AmiZilla Initiative to also include IBrowse, Voyager & AWeb. What this means is if the coders of these browsers update their programs to a functional comparable feature set of Mozilla 1.5 or FireBird they will win the AmiZilla contest and get the money. The programming teams will have to study the rich and extensive feature set of Mozilla or Firebird and update their browsers to something similar. Keep in mind that this is a contest so only the winner that crosses the finish line first wins. I respect and commend the Amiga browser developers for all of their hard work over the years and hope this puts them on equal footing for a chance to win the over $4100 that has already been collected for AmiZilla. The requirements will stay the same as far as making it available for Amiga, MorphOS, AROS, Amiga Forever, WinUAE Etc. Keep in mind teams have already been working hard part time to port Mozilla so keep the funds coming in to motivate these teams to bring this project to completion so that other new projects can be started like updating the Video Toaster Flyer source code. The new players in this contest (IBrowse, Voyager & AWeb) will also want incentive to update and extend their applications. The money already collected is a good start but may not be enough to get the teams to spend as much time on the AmiZilla Project as they normally would with a much large pot of funds to win.

Current Booty: $4159.40

Mailinglist now has over 220 members and over 330 messages, most are about programming and porting Mozilla.

AmiZilla website has gotten over 2 million hits since appearing on the famous unix geek website slashdot.

AmiZilla continues to gather positive press for the Amiga and MorphOS by being covered on mainstream websites like CNET's news.com, mozillazine.org and many others.

http://news.com.com/2009-1088-984352.html

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3262

http://www.toolinux.com/lininfo/news/news/news20030608003711.htm

Keep in mind that the AmiZilla Project needs you to be successful. The booty is now over $4150, which is a impressive amount of money for an Amiga project. If only one programmer was working on the port this would be a nice reward. However several programmers are working together. Once the money is split among coders the booty is not big enough. Please contribute if you can, every dollar helps motivate programmers to make the AmiZilla Project a success. After the release of AmiZilla more projects are being developed like Hot CoCo (JVM) and F Gordon (Flash). The development and launch of these add-ons to AmiZilla depend on the success of that project. Paypal donations can be sent in via this weblink.
www.amizilla.org


Best regards

Bill Panagouleas


About AmiZilla
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/Compatible systems that programmers will be falling over themselves getting this application coded in record time. Project now welcomes the programming teams of IBrowse, Voyager and AWeb to join the contest.

About DiscreetFX
DiscreetFX has been creating software products for the Amiga, video editing & computer generated graphics (CGI) industry since 1995. The Amiga computer defined and created the video editing, computer graphics market with its birth in 1985. DiscreetFX creates Real-time transitions and effects seen on over 100 television programs including Blind Date, 5th Wheel, Shipmates and more! You can also see DiscreetFX software used on the following networks HBO, Showtime, Discovery Channel, PBS, Fox and more!
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 1 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by krize on 30-Oct-2003 10:02 GMT
Very good !!!!!

Exiting to see if other teams (Aweb/Ibrowse or even Voayager) will see interest in this .... (lets hope so)

The web browser is the number 1. (killer) Application these days , and the classic, morphOs and AmigaOs4 will benefit greatly if this gets done .....


please :))))
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 2 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Oct-2003 10:32 GMT
There's unlimited opportunity for squabbling here... moving the goal posts is not so smart I think

First since Bill mentions a "first across the line" approach to distributing the money we have to ask how that line will be drawn. Is an alpha of Moz 1.0 which can barely read even ANN.lu "enough" to win? How about a version of IBrowse hacked to do some primitive CSS font & color stuff? Is it important to support MARQUEE? How about Z depth? SSL (the crypto library in Moz was notoriously hard to port, maybe it still is)?

For browsers that aren't licensed under the GNU GPL or similar, what ensures that after the finishing line is passed the users (and groups in some cases) who donated to Amizilla will actually benefit? Will developers who claim the prize be compelled to free the resulting browser? To give away copies to those who donated for the prize? Will they even be compelled to distribute it properly at all (imagine if they announce, after winning, that it will only be available on AROS!)

All of this stuff should have been set in stone before Bill started putting other people's money in his bank account.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 3 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Bill Panagouleas on 30-Oct-2003 10:39 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Anonymous):
Anonymous I welcome your comments and request that you join the project if your interested in helping it succeed. Please draw up plan for the team.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 4 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Bill Panagouleas on 30-Oct-2003 10:56 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Anonymous):
As it has been stated on the AmiZilla website from day 1 buggy software is not acceptible. A AmiZilla solution counts only if it is a stable browser that does not crash all the time.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 5 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Robert on 30-Oct-2003 11:29 GMT
Nice move.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 6 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Oct-2003 11:37 GMT
u want to kill ibrowse and voyager and make them gpl ?
anyway, we dont mind about that, we where speaking about amizilla ....
so why there is no status report at all ? this project try to make so
much noise, but when will we see anything ?
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 7 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Oct-2003 11:41 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (Anonymous):
?

English please
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 8 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by hooligan/dcs on 30-Oct-2003 12:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (Anonymous):
I will spell it for you, in plain english:

S T A T U S R E P O R T
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 9 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Oct-2003 12:31 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (Anonymous):
what dont you understand ?
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 10 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Oct-2003 12:33 GMT
As long as the source of the browser is free (as in freedom) then it doesn't matter which browser gets the money, but I do NOT want my money to go to a closed source project!
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 11 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by krize on 30-Oct-2003 12:48 GMT
Why all the anonymous posts ????
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 12 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 30-Oct-2003 14:14 GMT
Just a waste of time for the teams which doesn't win (if you include others aswell) plus it might bring less motivation to those who have already started if you count more people in the challange.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 13 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 30-Oct-2003 14:15 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Anonymous):
For browsers that aren't licensed under the GNU GPL or similar, what ensures that after the finishing line is passed the users (and groups in some cases) who donated to Amizilla will actually benefit? Will developers who claim the prize be compelled to free the resulting browser? To give away copies to those who donated for the prize? Will they even be compelled to distribute it properly at all (imagine if they announce, after winning, that it will only be available on AROS!)

--

exactly, maybe many wanted to see a free good browser and don't give a shit for a commercial one.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 14 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by reflect on 30-Oct-2003 14:19 GMT
In reply to Comment 10 (Anonymous):
I don't give a rats ass if the money goes to say, the IBrowse team. The efforts that these people has put down in order to still develop an Amiga browser these days is well worth the money, even if it is closed source. I commend the initiate and I hope this will spur all the teams out there to develop their browsers further.

It's about time that we put our money where our mouth is. If just half of the people that want a good Amiga browser donated $10 we'd have so much money that it would be quite a huge sum for this market. I still don't see what's holding people up, not a whole lot of people has contributed. Come on, show your support! It's needed!
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 15 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by hippie2000 on 30-Oct-2003 16:41 GMT
what about "if winning browser is closed source it must
not forbib portings to amiga derivate platforms for political
reasons, once a trustful coder who must contract to keep the
confidential source private applies for the task" or the like,
to avoid platform combat through such an event...

on the other side its a bit late to change rules imho.
is that still fair then?
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 16 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 30-Oct-2003 17:04 GMT
If:

(1) Open Source browsers were the Amizilla target - not mixing it in with commercial Amiga-derived browsers that should fend for themselves as commercial entities. And since the start I've wondered if something KHTML wasn't just as likely or more likely than Mozilla or Firebird to be succesfully ported -

(2) there was some evidence that ports would support modern Amigalike efforts without trying to satisfy non-PPC Amiga use, which just isn't realistic, it's a hindrance -

(3) the name Amizilla got dumped (since Mozilla would not be the target then) and the Boing emphasis too {since then, a couple target platforms would not be officially BOING ; }, and a suitably PROFESSIONAL more "neutral" icon and logotype were adopted that could represent all -

(4) there was evidence that some effort was working hard and able to go forward in a decent timeframe, focused on coding and not just planning, and able to show at least some evidence of knowledgable project management and timelined progress. I'd prefer to actually see all the talent working on the same effort, and digging the spirit of "cooperation".

Then: I would not be hesitant on behalf of Phoenix and Genesi to pledge to double the booty and provide maling lists, forums, filespace, website and website assistance like the others we are preparing for various projects and OSes (such as linux.pegasosppc.com - gladiateur.pegasosppc.com - etc), and get this effort offical IBM Partner status when completed, including use of all logos and listings (yes, as we said earlier, we are not stopping at the Ready For IBM Techology level - we are going for more significant levels of partnership and status).

Specific applications can gain from this and it would really please me to see a browser port effort succeed and be awarded this status : }
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 17 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 30-Oct-2003 17:06 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (greenboy):
That is DOUBLE THE BOOTY - yes, DOUBLE in case that fact seemed buried in the sea of conditional text ; }


<--greenboy---<<<<
coordinator & facilitator-at-large
Phoenix Developer Consortium [http://phinixi.com]
 
 
 
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 18 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by pixie on 30-Oct-2003 17:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (greenboy):
In this conditions AWeb could well represent the most advanced solution... as for point 2, let's not forguet that if you targuet at Open Source solution, you should also targuet at AROS which is also Open Source and powerfull enough to run a full powered mozilla, and if AROS can run it so can AOS 68k, and if you think an ancient Amiga can't run it, even if this is true trough emulation it shurelly can, so why not making it if the efforts for doing so over a multitude of Amiga reference platforms are so low?

I can't understand why this need to do it just for PPC...
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 19 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by smithy on 30-Oct-2003 17:49 GMT
On Amizilla's main page (http://www.discreetfx.com/AmiZilla.html), it's main topic seems to be money. Why is there no progress reports?

How can you expect anyone to give you money, when:

1. No visible signs of progress. Not even a progress report.

2. No intention of HOW it will be ported. Will it be done in a way so that new releases of Mozilla will be able to be ported virtually straight away? (i.e. porting lower level code so higher level code will run without changes?). From reading the webpage, there is no sign that anyone at Amizilla knows how to do it.

3. Why does it have to have its own name? The Windows or Linux versions of Mozilla aren't called "WinZilla", etc... Is Amizilla a fork? Will the source be in the real Mozilla's repository?

4. Who's working on it? How many people?

5. Who's account is the "booty" money in? I would assume that any working port will take a LONG time (at least 12 months), so who is earning interest on this? I assume this interest will go to whoever comes up with the finished product first?

The webpage really needs to be redesigned to provide some real information. I can't really be bothered to go hunting around mailing lists or forums for information that should be easily availabile.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 20 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by smithy on 30-Oct-2003 17:51 GMT
(from http://www.discreetfx.com/AmiZillaFAQ.htm)
>Q: Why @ least Amiga OS 3.1?
>
>A: Many Amiga owners have not upgraded to 3.1 so maybe AmiZilla could
>stimulate sales of OS 3.9 to help Amiga Inc.

This is quite plainly ridiculous. You are using political reasons to decide what version of AmigaOS it should run on. I could understand if the product had to be severely or crippled to run on OS3.0, but the fact is it wouldn't.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 21 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by John on 30-Oct-2003 17:52 GMT
Over $4000 is still way to low, any serious developer would want a load more and would NEVER work under the forceful conditions by Bill.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 22 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 30-Oct-2003 17:57 GMT
In reply to Comment 18 (pixie):
I see I was not entirely correct in my wording (concerning PCC), since AROS has always been on my list of targets, along with MorphOS and AmigaOS4. But I'm not convinced the 68K series Amigas need to be mentioned because they represent (1) slow and (2) old and (3) no longer fabbed.

The developers who may want to participate may see these 68K machines as part of the picture (and if they present a compelling case I will listen). But I think it's important to focus primarily on targets that development could go forward on, and not be complicating the support issues.

...I could be wrong :  }
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 23 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Stephane Desrosiers on 30-Oct-2003 18:04 GMT
In reply to Comment 22 (greenboy):
Well 68K would appease Amithlon, UAE users. ;) (Granted I don't really use either. :P)
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 24 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 30-Oct-2003 18:05 GMT
In reply to Comment 21 (John):
> John :
>Over $4000 is still way to low, any serious developer would want a load more and would NEVER work under the forceful conditions by Bill.

And $8000 would be too low too, if we were talking development driven purely by commercial philosophies. But in my case I am talking OPEN SOURCE, which has a tradition of motivations that MAY include finance, but not ONLY finance - and often have no visible financial incentives whatsoever.

We're dealing with a community here that hasn't intersected widely with Open Source methodologies, and it's nice that at least there are people like Bill Panagouleas and the other contributors who are attempting to help things along. Some benefit is better than none; perhaps that's why Team AROS bounties exist, yes no?
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 25 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by pixie on 30-Oct-2003 18:08 GMT
In reply to Comment 22 (greenboy):
The good thing of 68k processor is that it's starting to be the defacto Amiga virtual processor, and that by itself shouldn't be negleted... doing it on 68k assures it can be run on almost every machine out there, heck even on PS2!! ;)
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 26 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Vexar on 30-Oct-2003 18:09 GMT
Opening up the contest sounds to me, unfortunately, like a lack of resolve by the orchestrators of this contest. I see things falling apart, if suddenly this was a necessary step in the contest, as it is clearly creating confusion. The announcement, for all its expression, lacked any indication that any of the commercial Amiga browser businesses were interested in the purse, hence the request. I would also think that if there were 200 amiga users out there that would buy the next Amiga browser, then any commercial Amiga web browser company would rather see the $4k + in the form of licenses.

Open source is the only way to go, for the Amiga, until those Amiga One units start hitting volume milestones, anyway. After you've paid $1000 for your Amiga One, how much money do you really have left for software, anyway?
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 27 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 30-Oct-2003 19:23 GMT
In reply to Comment 26 (Vexar):
> Vexar :
>Open source is the only way to go, for the Amiga, until those Amiga One units start hitting volume milestones, anyway. After you've paid $1000 for your Amiga One, how much money do you really have left for software, anyway?

I'll again mention the Genesi SuperBundle. We are working the concept so that old and new software developers are encouraged to get back into it by working with them to license their titles so that both the users and the developers benefit financially and realistically for the current marketplace.

Of course we are also making it possible for Open Source and non-commercial developers to be included, and we have begun to show that we are not bundling one title in an application category while leaving developers of similar titles in the same category out of the picture. For instance, if Pixel32 or Photogenic's developer owners wish to be included and feel they reach satisfatory license conditions they can be "superbundled" right beside ImageFX and fxPaint.

We want users to be able to find what they need, and developers to feel less risk in working at building up the MorphOS and Pegasos communities.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 28 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 30-Oct-2003 20:25 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (reflect):
"It's about time that we put our money where our mouth is. If just half of the people that want a good Amiga browser donated $10 we'd have so much money that it would be quite a huge sum for this market"

How much do you really think that is? Let's be generous and say there are 10 000 active Amiga users and half of them donate that $10. That's $50 000

If you hired someone like me, that means you can afford to pay them salary (no expenses, no overheads) for 12 months. Nowhere near enough man hours to get the job (porting Mozilla) done. My guess would be for a 5 man team, 6-12 months to a beta quality PPC only release with some features disabled. Perhaps $200 000.

To write a completely new Amiga browser aimed at AmigaOS 4, well if I was given that task I'd ask for 24-36 months, and a team of 20 engineers including three or four specific named people (for the CSS support, the DOM core and the Javascript engine, there are very few genuine experts in those areas). My guess is that you'd be talking ballpark of $10 million.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 29 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by smithy on 30-Oct-2003 23:56 GMT
In reply to Comment 28 (Anonymous):
>To write a completely new Amiga browser aimed at AmigaOS 4, well if I was
>given that task I'd ask for 24-36 months, and a team of 20 engineers including
>three or four specific named people (for the CSS support, the DOM core and the
>Javascript engine, there are very few genuine experts in those areas). My
>guess is that you'd be talking ballpark of $10 million.

Writing a browser from scratch could be done in 12 months by 2 people. And $10 million???? Average C++ programmer salary = £30-£40 x 2 people = £80,000 ($50,000) maximum. There are thousands of experts in CSS, DOM and Javascript.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 30 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by reflect on 31-Oct-2003 03:13 GMT
In reply to Comment 28 (Anonymous):
Well, we are for the most part talking about bedroom coders here, people that already has a job and code for amiga -for the fun of it-. Give that team of say, 5-10 people those $50k and see what happens. I'm pretty damn sure they'd say "whay, that's not a sum to neglect!". I mean, look at how much money bedroom coders have gotten on projects such as this one for the past 5 years, hm? Look at how much money those shareware programs that asks you to pay them $5 has got.
Seems to me like you're confusing the amiga bedroom coders with some commercial entity..
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 31 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 31-Oct-2003 09:11 GMT
In reply to Comment 29 (smithy):
It's not going to get done by people who can't even use xe.com

"Average C++ programmer salary = £30-£40 x 2 people = £80,000 ($50,000) maximum."

Wrong. £80 000 = $135 000, so your project has blown its budget by more than 150% already, congratulations.

"There are thousands of experts in CSS, DOM and Javascript."

No, there aren't. There are thousands of web hackers who can _write_ CSS, or DOM, or Javascript. A browser project can use those, but only as testers, an auxiliary to the engineering staff mentioned. The really expensive people are those who can _implement_ these technologies effectively. To do that without wasting a few years building prototypes you need experience. Where could such experience be obtained? Four projects: Opera (good luck) IE (all reassigned to other projects) Mozilla.org (some left for Opera already) and kHTML (can you offer better pay & conditions than Apple?)
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 32 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by pixie on 31-Oct-2003 10:12 GMT
In reply to Comment 27 (greenboy):
"For instance, if Pixel32 or Photogenic's developer owners wish to be included and feel they reach satisfatory license conditions they can be "superbundled" right beside ImageFX and fxPaint."

I saw the demo of Pixel32 and was amazed by it's features! Hope you can get it ported!
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 33 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by o1i on 31-Oct-2003 10:37 GMT
Well, a lot of people screaming for a status report, so I'll give
you one ;).

I am one of the registered sourceforge developers and to be honest, I
don't care, if the bounty is 4k or 8k. I try to get Thunderbird compiled
for amigaOS. If I get a bounty afterwards, well, nice, I'll by a
Peg with the money ;).

But at the moment, there seems to be too less manpower for the porting effort.
This would change maybe, as soon as there exists a compiling alpha version.
It's more fun, to improve a raw version than to dig through hundreds
of Makefiles..

Status report? I think, nobody managed so far, to do a successfull "make".
I am switching to cross compiling at the moment, as the lack of both speed and
stability makes it impossible, to build thunderbird under amigaOS, even
on a quite fast winUAE setup.

But as I don't have much spare time at the moment, my progress is slow, don't
count on my results in the near future, sorry.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 34 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Vexar on 31-Oct-2003 13:50 GMT
In reply to Comment 27 (greenboy):
Greenboy,
Genesi seems to stand apart from the course of the AmigaOne. There's no doubt about that. That is a solid idea to ship a computer with some starter software. It encourages development and aids in platform adoption.
Now if only you could get someone to port Mozilla or Star Office!

-- Vexar, the original (earlier post in thread is mine, I forgot to sign)
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 35 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 31-Oct-2003 15:06 GMT
In reply to Comment 34 (Vexar):
Vexar, we certainly are aware much has to be done to make a viable platform for the future, whether for those using the desktop, or those who are or will be working on OEM projects, and we are going as fast as we can to allocate resources, bring more devlopers on board (man is my email backed up!) and make partners from other communites and companies in the larger world!

Stay tuned : }


<--greenboy---<<<<
coordinator & facilitator-at-large
Phoenix Developer Consortium [http://phinixi.com]
 
 
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 36 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 31-Oct-2003 15:14 GMT
In reply to Comment 32 (pixie):
>>For instance, if Pixel32 or Photogenic's developer owners wish to be included and feel they reach satisfatory license conditions they can be "superbundled" right beside ImageFX and fxPaint.

>I saw the demo of Pixel32 and was amazed by it's features! Hope you can get it ported!

Hi Pixie,

Years ago, Phoenix lobbied to get Pixel32 on QNX and it happened. Of course, at that time QNX's health and status was instrumental in building a good case for a port. Now we are making contact and asking that its author consider MorphOS. I caution people who might rally, that the all-too-often Amiga community of blind advocacy and ballot stuffing is not the way to go about this. Presenting well-toned responses that outline business plans, roadmap, and finance without being too optimistic or pushy is what seems to get the job done.

We'll see, on this front and others : }


<--greenboy---<<<<
coordinator & facilitator-at-large
Phoenix Developer Consortium [http://phinixi.com]
 
 
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 37 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 31-Oct-2003 16:16 GMT
In reply to Comment 33 (o1i):
> o1i :
>I am one of the registered sourceforge developers and to be honest, I
don't care, if the bounty is 4k or 8k. I try to get Thunderbird compiled
for amigaOS. If I get a bounty afterwards, well, nice, I'll by a
Peg with the money ;).

Nice to hear ; } ... but of course what I'd like to see more than anything is for a modern Open Source browser (for now don't care about email, newsreader, environment, etc - as BROWSER has been the BIG problem). Anyway, a larger bounty may be helpful to some. But I suspect some hope of a wider-spread effort on a more practical target with an organized achievable goal is more important to those who dig Open Source. Instead of having a few teams all too beleaguered, it would be nice to have one talent pool working on the same goal(s) - engine and GUI.


>But at the moment, there seems to be too less manpower for the porting effort.

Yes, this is what I think. And part of the problem is the target has been considered insurmountable by some, and they view KHTML as more approachable. That, and the Open Aweb team is in one place and the Amizilla people are really in another. That's the same kind of thinking that originally gave the pretty damn small Amiga platform THREE BROWSERS that were practicaly guaranteed to stall out as time went by, financially, and manpower-wise.

I hope we can think smarter, FINALLY.


>This would change maybe, as soon as there exists a compiling alpha version.
It's more fun, to improve a raw version than to dig through hundreds
of Makefiles..

Right.


>Status report? I think, nobody managed so far, to do a successfull "make".
I am switching to cross compiling at the moment, as the lack of both speed and
stability makes it impossible, to build thunderbird under amigaOS, even
on a quite fast winUAE setup.

In Phoenix, Bill P and Genesi and BBRV and everyone else so inclined is talking about what resources can be allocated and how the effort can become realizable and focused. But most of us think Mozilla is not realitic, that KHTML is not only more realistic, but some others in the community wight actually decide to combine efforts were that the porting focus. Increasing the bounty is one thing that I consider helpful, but ultimately talent and resolve and cooperative leveraging are more important.


>But as I don't have much spare time at the moment, my progress is slow, don't
count on my results in the near future, sorry.

Thanks for being upfront and honest. I have checked the Amizilla SF area from time to time to see what's going on, and have come to the conclusion that slow and future were linked somehow, that changes needed to be made to give anyone a fighting chance ; }


<--greenboy---<<<<
coordinator & facilitator-at-large
Phoenix Developer Consortium [http://phinixi.com]
 
 
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 38 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Amigan Software on 01-Nov-2003 00:55 GMT
We intend to join the AWeb development effort. It seems pointless to us to port a fourth browser to the Amiga when there are already three good Amiga browsers (and a few incomplete ones that are not so good).
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 39 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 01-Nov-2003 01:32 GMT
In reply to Comment 38 (Amigan Software):
> Amigan Software :
>We intend to join the AWeb development effort. It seems pointless to us to port a fourth browser to the Amiga when there are already three good Amiga browsers (and a few incomplete ones that are not so good).

Are you talking about this?: http://aweb.sunsite.dk/dev/howdoesitwork.html

Note that the choice has been to port the KHTML engine for the "modern version" - which is the strategy I think shows good promise.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 40 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by greenboy on 01-Nov-2003 03:26 GMT
Like so many things in this tiny community, conversely it seems much of the dialog ends up taking place in a million different venues with many of the people who might be concerned not seeing all that is said : {

But anyway,

http://www.morphos-news.de/comments.php?lg=en&nid=525
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 41 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 01-Nov-2003 08:19 GMT
In reply to Comment 28 (Anonymous):
"How much do you really think that is? Let's be generous and say there are 10 000 active Amiga users and half of them donate that $10. That's $50 000"

10.000?
Say sales of pegasos and amigaone has been around 1000-1500 units, I could get one of those even thought I haven't used my amiga in say 5 years. On the other side there are probably a few amiga users which haven't got one of them yet, thought i think it's weird since it would mean such an improvement. But I think you can expect it to be more like 2.000 users or so.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 42 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by vortexau on 01-Nov-2003 08:24 GMT
In reply to Comment 9 (Anonymous):
> what dont you understand ?
Myself- I don't understand why YOU discriminate against the use of the apostrophe? :-)
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 43 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by - GALAXY - on 01-Nov-2003 11:43 GMT
I think you people are wasting your time with this misbelief:

'AWeb is planning to port KHTML'

They are not going to port anything because I have backed out of all this crap 2-3 days ago now. Glenn and I were the only persons who have talked about this using the AWeb resources (mailinglist and frontpage) because it was offered to us. The announcements HMK made on all sorts of public places where holdless and not done with any feeback to us - developers, who intended to port this or talked about this.

Glenn has NO time doing the port because of private stuff, I have backed out - so there is NO people remaining to do this task and everything is basically set back to ZERO. Three is no one working on it, no one talking about it and I doubt that anyone ever cares rats arse for it either. So please get over this misblief. Glenn and I were the only persons behind this AWeb KHTML port and none of us is working on it. So please stop spreading these rumours which are NOT true. You only raise expectations of users without that even one byte has been written.

If you want KHTML please start porting it - YES YOU - if you want Amizilla (talks for over 1 year but null progress) then sit down and start porting it - YES YOU AGAIN.

- GALAXY -
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 44 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by o1i on 01-Nov-2003 12:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 43 (- GALAXY -):
> Glenn has NO time doing the port because of private stuff, I have backed out -
> so there is NO people remaining to do this task and everything is basically
> set back to ZERO. Three is no one working on it, no one talking about it and I
> doubt that anyone ever cares rats arse for it either. So please get over this
> misblief. Glenn and I were the only persons behind this AWeb KHTML port and
> none of us is working on it. So please stop spreading these rumours which are
> NOT true. You only raise expectations of users without that even one byte has
> been written.

Seems familiar. Same fir amizilla. The people that talk about it are
not the same, doing it. But hey, I am a coder, not a PR guy ;),.
But raising wrong expections is a bit of a problem, I agree.

> If you want KHTML please start porting it - YES YOU - if you want Amizilla
> (talks for over 1 year but null progress) then sit down and start porting it -
> YES YOU AGAIN.

Ok, I'll do it. Well, and amizilla does not hav null progress, 0.00001 maybe,
but not null ;).
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 45 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 01-Nov-2003 13:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 43 (- GALAXY -):
Well, it's not as if you have actually done anything.
I do know that serious progress has been going on over the last couple of days, so obviously you're misinformed.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 46 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by - GALAXY - on 01-Nov-2003 14:04 GMT
In reply to Comment 45 (Anonymous):
Actually NO one has done anything but it's always used to tell the public 'look there is work being done' while it's not the case. I wanted to clearify this misbelief - specially for the KHTML part + AWeb which has been used as argument all the time. What other people do elsewhere is far from my knowledge but if work is in progress then good.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 47 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by Henrik Mikael Kristensen on 01-Nov-2003 14:20 GMT
In reply to Comment 44 (o1i):
"Seems familiar. Same fir amizilla. The people that talk about it are
not the same, doing it. But hey, I am a coder, not a PR guy ;),.
But raising wrong expections is a bit of a problem, I agree."

Sorry, if it gives the wrong picture. No, KHTML is at this moment not making any progress, because no one is available to do the port. Only two had signed up (Galaxy and Glenn Hisdal), but due to various circumstances, neither has gotten anywhere. The current developers are either busy with the existing AWeb or have no time to do the porting.

Planning is of course not the same as doing it, but it doesn't prevent you from making a plan, does it? It tells people what we want to see, a roadmap for people to follow, something that programmers can see and say: "Ah, now this is something I want to do."
I don't really see any other choice but to come up with a plan and wait for people to accept it, join up and start programming. What else can you do?

It's like building a house. If you start laying bricks on the ground, making things up as you go along without a plan, you're bound for trouble, both for yourself and the people with whom you were supposed to be working. But if you make a good plan, you can hire any skilled constructor to do the work for you. Same thing. Only, the constructors are strangely absent here!

I'm not a good C coder myself, or I would of course have started the porting process myself.

But we've discussed the porting process, we've got a pretty good picture of how to do it and made a plan. We have been authorized to post on the kfm-devel mailing list and talk directly with the original KHTML authors, we have CVS space, a website, mailing lists, the whole works. Now we need to do the port.

As I said in a mail to the aweb developer list, it feels like being at a soccer game, with the ball sitting in the middle of the field and the players sitting at each end of the field, talking about how great soccer is to play. It feels like that.

Regards,
Henrik Mikael Kristensen
AWeb Development Team
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 48 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by - GALAXY - on 01-Nov-2003 14:43 GMT
In reply to Comment 47 (Henrik Mikael Kristensen):
Thank you Henrik Mikael Kristensen for your clearing words here. It's not that we wouldn't have started already. Personally spoken for me then I would have started already months ago and have had presented a public repository where people themself could see the progress and participate to it. It's not like anyone here could blame anyone of us (either the AWeb team, me or Glenn) for not wanting to do the work. Those who like to blame anyone could stuff the finger up their ass in first place and ask themselves why they hadn't started on their own (don't forget to clean the smelly fingers afterwards). But I was in the circumstance as a worker where I was told 'hey do work and fix the house' but without tools to do the work. There is no need to manifest any misbeliefs anywhere. Well for the Masterplan, I was always criticising it a bit e.g. spreading the word like 'hey we are doing something' while nothing has been done at all. It's like someone would like to build a house but can not afford to start it within the next 20 years. Such Masterplans only seed misbeliefs in the public and manifest a wrong understanding into peoples head. They expect stuff to be under work already which is not the case, there are (were) also people who already belief that there is something they can use already (as my mailbox told me many times.. people already talked about if the stuff can use normal shockwave plugins and things like that) and I always told them, sorry, we weren't able to do anything so far. Whom you gonna blame here ? People who were really really burning and willing to work on that or those who wanted to offer the tools but couldn't deliver ? Or are there really naive people outside who believe that we work on some crappy UAE gayness and work our ass off for something we can hardly use ourself afterwards (we were told this many times as well). I only bring up some clearing words here that people need to understand and think about it.

Neither KHTML not even Amizilla (regardles if the projects have been started or not) are NOT yet ready to use and they probably wouldn't be usable till 1st or 2nd quarter next year.. If so at all.. A lot of people here have really strange ideas like 'wow 2 coders can do the port within 1 month' I haven't heard so much bullshit in my whole life - from wannabe experts. Actually spread by those who never programmed anything.

Look, the people working on AWeb, Voyager and IBrowse are skilled people. People who spent the past decade (some longer some less longer) on hacking on the Amiga, who know the system from ground up. We see how far they got with these browsers (if they wouldn't lack so much then there wouldn't be people crying for Mozilla or KHTML here). The progress of these 3 Browsers is going on slowly, and yet people like to make us belive that something so big as that can be done in 1 month with 2 people, while REAL experts already work slowly on their own solutions ? I think people are kinda trapped by illusion here.

What we have is AWeb, IBrowse and Voyager all with different capabilities, limits and possibilities and we have NOT KHTML and Mozilla.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 49 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by - GALAXY - on 01-Nov-2003 14:50 GMT
In reply to Comment 48 (- GALAXY -):
I want to add one more thing here. The slow progress of the 3 native solutions are due to less people. It's not lacking of skilled people. It's lacking of people who contribute and support it. Same is valid for KHTML or Mozilla. We all know the human being - you are most of the time demotivated, have other problems to solve, private life, work and a lot more stuff and you are not working 24hrs per day on that software, there is also times where you are entirely fedup and need a bunch of days to reconsider or do something else only to get back fresh on work. What these projects need are not 1000 days of talking, they need people seriously wanting to work on it. People (who not necessarily need to be skilled) but willing to work on it. Teamwork, people who can work together to achieve a goal, step by step, little steps day by day to achive the goal. Not measuring who is the Elite skilled programmer supplying 2000000 lines per day, no it's teamwork to achieve the goal..

A sentence I bet that many people will scare away from it because they do not know what the fuck teamwork is (I realized it in the past couple of months). People with shit fucking mood, people who know much more than others but can't contribute a fucking shit and people with the 'tunnel-view'.

Think about it.
AmiZilla Welcomes Others To Browse For Cash : Comment 50 of 54ANN.lu
Posted by o1i on 01-Nov-2003 14:51 GMT
In reply to Comment 47 (Henrik Mikael Kristensen):
Well, didn't want to be critical. I think the PR and the talks are
necessary to attract new people, I wouldn't have started either, without the
discussion.

But it's the same as in a real software development company: For a coder
it is sometimes difficult to realize, that the "marketing talk" really
talks about his software and his work ;). As long as the people talking
are here also, when it comes to defending slow progress and problems,
well, then ok, the developers can concentrate on their work. But if
there are a lot of talks like "it will be done soon", "a lot of people
a working on it" etc, then after some time the few developers will be
asked, where the progress is with "so much people working on it".
And this does not motivate people ;).
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