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Amiga Mozilla The Internet

Former Netscape Executive gives $4000 to AmiZilla 360

Posted by CowboyNeal from the 'tis-the-season dept.
POds writes "Recently a Former Netscape Executive made a 2000 dollar donation to the Amizilla project, but for one reason or another, decided 2000 wasn't good enough and donated, yet another 2000 dollars. His only request is that he wants to see the amount get over $10,000 so is requesting others donate what they can. The Booty is now over $8400 and goes to the first developer(s) to port Mozilla to the Amiga platform."
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Former Netscape Executive gives $4000 to AmiZilla More

Former Netscape Executive gives $4000 to AmiZilla

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  • Coderbase: Convinced (Score:5, Funny)

    by anaphora ( 680342 ) * on Saturday December 20, 2003 @12:44PM (#7773382) Journal
    8. Linux Coders we want you. Linux programmers are also welcome to try their hand @ porting Mozilla to Amiga. They are a talented group of coders and have given Microsoft a lot of grief. Nice Show!

    Well, you just found your coderbase, AmiZilla. Anytime you offer money, bring up microsoft negatively, feed L-Users' egos, and reward them for doing what they're good at, you've got 80% of the L-Zealots behind you.
    • There's a lot of history of sticking it Microsoft when you refer to Amiga. A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away... There was COMMODORE!

      To keep from starving to death, Bill Gates sold an unlimited liscense for BASIC to Commodore for a ham sandwich and a bag of doritos. Commodore then proceeded to put BASIC on 30 million computers, without having to pay Bill Gates a single dime.

      It was a better time back then.

  • $4000! (Score:5, Funny)

    by neonstz ( 79215 ) * on Saturday December 20, 2003 @12:48PM (#7773403) Homepage

    That's $400 per potentional user!

    • You are probably right. I don't think many use it as their plattform of choice. But, hmm why not port it. I would like to see a real x plattform browser...

      • Re:$4000! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by 56ker ( 566853 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:30PM (#7773945) Homepage Journal
        I think you've underestimated the amount of Amiga users. The main reason (I'm sure) Mozilla hasn't been ported yet is that the Amiga already has three browsers of its own - Voyager, IBrowser & AWeb.

        • Re:$4000! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by gilesjuk ( 604902 )
          They were on about porting Mozilla to the Amiga back when Mozilla was created. The problem at the time was the Amiga APIs and GUI systems were all C based. C++ wasn't really in widespread use.

          I don't know what the current situation is, but I feel the replacement for the Amiga is Linux.
          • There are C++ compilers for the Amiga though - can't think of the name of one off the top of my head but a quick search of Aminet would prove me right.

  • Please give us Firebird first (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cloudless.net ( 629916 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @12:50PM (#7773415) Homepage
    I would love to see the Mozilla team to work towards the 1.0 version of Firebird first. Please set the priority straight.

  • *sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20, 2003 @12:51PM (#7773422)
    What $10,000 could have done to advance some more meaningful Open Source project. What's next-- OpenOffice for C64?

    • Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LearnToSpell ( 694184 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:13PM (#7773552) Homepage
      Why the hell not? It's his money, not yours. If you think there's enough demand for OO.o on C64 (or whatever), and you want it that bad, put up some money and see what happens. Criticizing what other people think is important enough to spend money on is pretty lame.

    • Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Funny)

      by Bloody Twit ( 567103 )
      Now that I found some documentation for GEOS [elysium.pl] I'll get right on it. Might have to dust-off the ol' 512K RAM expansion cart, though...

    • Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Stray7Xi ( 698337 )
      I'm glad you realize that you should donate to projects you find meaningful. (Apparently this guy already did)

    • Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mdwh2 ( 535323 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @02:47PM (#7774038) Journal

      What $10,000 could have done to advance some more meaningful Open Source project. What's next-- OpenOffice for C64?

      First of all, it's Amiga not C64. I don't like Macs, but that doesn't mean I say "What next, an Apple II port?" when I see a Mac story.

      Secondly, I don't know about bounties in particular, but bear in mind that platforms such as Windows have had a phenomenal amount spent on them in terms of general software development, compared to niche platforms. We're talking billions. Macs probably get a fair amount too. Linux gets plenty of both commercial and open source development.

      Yet as soon as someone stumps up a few thousand to help fund a possible port of a browser (to a platform whose browsers lack all sorts of modern features), this is seemingly unfair?

      Rightly or wrongly, the market is driven by those with money to spend. Most of the time, that means that Windows wins, and platforms like the Amiga lose out. This is one of those rare times when things don't go that way.

  • Different Idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by Matt2000 ( 29624 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @12:56PM (#7773446) Homepage

    I'll give $10,000 to all those who refuse to port anything to the Amiga, just to let those poor souls who still care move on with their lives.

    Please guys, this holiday season take some time out of your schedule and knock an Amiga user unconscious, then nurse them back to health. That won't accomplish much in the long term, I agree, but it will shut them up for a couple days.

  • I'm looking for the new amiga... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by adept256 ( 732470 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @12:56PM (#7773448)
    because every couple of years I read something like this:
    http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,34922, 00.html
    the architecture of the original amiga was very innovative, more like a ps2 than a pc
    I still get a kick from looking at some raytraces I did back in the old amiga days
    • but it's nothing to pine over.

      Like the PS2, the multi-chip architecture was neccessary in order for the machine to be close to usable for the things people wanted to do with it.

      Some of that ideology still lives today, what with the everything-but-the-kitchen sink northbridges used by modern PCs and machintoshes. They shrunk it down to one chip, but the purpose is the same: take care of all the I/O in one place, and interrupt the CPU when it can use busmaster DMA to ferry it somewhere else.

      If they were to
      • at this point, the only architectures that are cheap enough to mass produce that perform well are: CPU+MMU, RAM channel, interconnect to northbridge or crossbar, single/multiple PCI (infiniband?) busses, AGP, with some built-in chips on the non-extendable PCI bus that graduates the offering levels (+SCSI, +dual GB LAN, +S-ATA, etc.)
        That's it. Doing anything else is expensive and dooms you right out the gate.

        The only people that can afford to do that on a large scale is Sun. But they choose more complex arc
      • Maybe that's why no one is releasing an updated Amiga. Everytime they get some engineers to come up with a system architecture, Steve Jobs reveals something almost exactly the same at MacWorld.

        Best conspiracy theory ever. The tinfoil hat is in the mail.
    • Actually, new Amigas are available now [eyetech.co.uk], and they are also not far away from releasing AmigaOS 4.0 [amiga.com].
      The previous version of the OS, v3.9 [amiga.com], was released less than 2 years ago, so I'm not so sure about the "aging-platform" talk.

  • always leaving out Atari... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [orpxnyl]> on Saturday December 20, 2003 @12:58PM (#7773462)
    Why stop at just the Amiga? How about the Atari ST platform? After all, STick, Cab, and Mosaic all ran on it... and, the ST had support built in for ISDN way back in 1985 in the OS...

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JamesP ( 688957 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:01PM (#7773488)
    Porting of MySQL to C64 begins, and an undisclosed donor has donated $5000 to the fist person to run Apache from a Tamagotchi

  • Amiga is dead (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:02PM (#7773494)
    3. The AmiZilla Project must fully compile with running binaries on each of the following Amiga-like OS's: OS3.1, OS3.5+, MorphOS, UAE, Amithlon, DraCo. (Hint: don't hit the hardware, and stick to OS3.1: MUI, ClassAct 2, some internal gadget system, and bgui are acceptable).

    I was the proud owner of a 500, 2000, and 4000(which I sold at a profit many years back). The Amiga was the hardware. It had a great API but the hardware(angus, denise, etc.) was what it was all about. If you aren't hitting the hardware, it's Amiga in name only.

  • Amiga zealots. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:07PM (#7773520)
    The Booty is now over $8400 and goes to the first developer(s) to port Mozilla to the Amiga platform.

    I'm a BSD and Macintosh fan. And even I think the Amiga is dead.

    It's not beleaguered. It's not "dying". It's dead. It's been ten years. For crissake, give up already. They were great back in the day, but so was Lionel Ritchie and skinny ties.

    --saint

    • Re:Amiga zealots. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Seehund ( 86897 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:29PM (#7773640) Homepage Journal
      Yes, the Amiga is dead and buried. The story is a bit misleading.

      "Port Mozilla to AmigaOS and similar/compatible OSes" would probably have been more accurate.

      AmigaOS [amiga.com] might get a chance to live on in version 4, on off the shelf 3rd party hardware, if the company that whimsically calls itself "Amiga Inc." would only give it a chance [8bit.co.uk] instead of actively doing all they can to kill it in its cradle. Then there's things like the API compatible MorphOS [morphos.net] and the open source AROS [aros.org].

      And no, Lionel Ritchie and skinny ties have never been great.

    • AMIGA AINT DEAD!!!

      It just smells funny...

      *hugs his A500*

    • Re:Amiga zealots. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by segmond ( 34052 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:36PM (#7773678)
      I hate your attitude, since when does population in terms of software use mean that a platform or a software is dead? Imagine this, is QBASIC dead? Sure, for developers right? But if some company out there is using it, which there are still many using it, and their business depends on it, and it does what it is suppose to do, why should they upgrade? Because people are saying it is dead? Let me ask you a question. Do you know how many QBasic apps are behind some business logic/functions out there? If I say more than 50,000. Will you be surprised? Do you know how many Amiga fans/users are out there? If there are 20,000 of them. That is still a very big user base. So long as they are happy with their OS and can do all that they desire, it is not dead. Whoopie, I use a P90mhz, 40mb, 2gig laptop. All my friends laugh at it and say it is ancient. I just smile, because it meets all my needs! So it's not ancient to me.
      • Yesterday i figured out that you can run Qbasic with dosbox on Linux. Haven't tried gorilla.bas yet :-)
      • I know a lot of companies use Qbasic for stepper motor control.

        here [aaroncake.net]

        I remember this one customer who had a PC based stepper motor controller running on a 8088 epson. (They used the machine for routing out a patterns in wood cabinets) Their sysadmin thought it would be a great idea to upgrade it to a 486, after which everthing broke. (well it still worked, but the timing for moving planks on/off the routing table, and cutting the actual design was totally screwed up)

        After looking at the Qbasic code, I s
      • For the QBasic case, the argument would be made on the basis of possible future problems.

        Do they have the source? (QuickBasic could build stand-alone apps)

        Can they find someone who can fix a sophisticated QBasic app if they find a bug?

        Do they want to add new features?

        Are there modern apps with the features they want?

        Do they want to integrate it with more modern software?

        Yes, QBasic is dead. And people who continue to use it may be running silly risks
    • For a platform that's been "dead" for ten years, the available hardware is stranglely up to date [eyetech.co.uk]...

  • I'll offer $5.00.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) * on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:08PM (#7773526) Journal
    If you port it to the Commodore 64.

    Seriously though, I love Amigas (had three of 'em up until a year ago) but the old machines are dying off partly because the batteries are cracking open and ruining the motherboards.

  • only 4k? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by n0k14 ( 719810 )
    Is it just me or is $4000 not very much money

    • Re:only 4k? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Little Brother ( 122447 )
      If it isn't much money to you, would you PLEASE send me just HALF of it? Please? No? Why not?

    • Re:only 4k? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by eln ( 21727 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @01:21PM (#7773596)
      Depends on what you think your time is worth I guess. For most programmers, $4000 for something that would probably take a few months at least of full time programming is an insult. For college students who could take a year doing it in their spare time, $4000 buys a whole lot of beer.

      If anyone does this though, I suspect it'll be a hard-core Amiga zealot whose primary motivation is not the money.
    • If you're doing it only for the money, then probably not. But if you'd like to spend time porting Mozilla anyway it's certainly a good added incentive to spend a few extra hours on it here and there.
  • I've never gotten the very rationale for all the work being done on Mozilla. I can understand a good standards-compliant and full-featured browser, but on one hand, Opera does a great job if you dont care about opensource like 99% of the users, and the rest simply use the IE that come with their OSes. Mozilla as many people have admitted is over-featured, but Firebird is not seeing much action in development either.

    So I think Mozilla is a bit of a developer challenge to see how many ports it can run on...
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I have both Mozilla and firebird on my desktop, usually I am browsing in mozilla. Seems that mozilla is a bit more polished at the moment than FB, but I am looking forward to a 1.0 firebird release.

      I have a 3.06 ghz p4 tho with a gig of ram.. FB doesn't seem faster than mozilla to me, so I am only interested in stability/features.

      I have used opera for a while, but was surprised to find that mozilla not only renders pages better usually, but also crashes less frequently.

      I am not trying to flame FB or Ope
    • Opera does a great job if you dont care about opensource like 99% of the users, and the rest simply use the IE that come with their OSes.

      I'm somehow doubting how well a project to port a closed source browser would go.

      Mozilla as many people have admitted is over-featured, but Firebird is not seeing much action in development either.

      In the GUI perhaps, but remember that any improvements in Mozilla's html rendering are automatically a part of firebird.

      but quite honestly, even most opensource users d
    • "So can someone who has been using Mozilla for along time explain the reason for all this work on Mozilla?"

      In this case, the reason would probably be that none of the other browsers you mentioned are available for the Amiga platform neither, and the Amigans don't want to continue struggling with their current sub-standard feature-lacking browsers.
  • Expense has thwarted my aquiring it.

    I appreciate this fellows offer and will remember it.
  • He actually just hit refresh and ended up double posting.
  • Now thats a thought.

    Does linux have any such thing or capability there now?

  • How do I contribute to the Mac-OS port bounty? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Andy_R ( 114137 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @04:11PM (#7774403) Homepage Journal
    If this system of bounty-posting works, I'd like to invest in getting a recent version of Mozilla ported to Mac-OS. The final build we got for Mac-OS doesn't have spam-filtering, fails to render slashdot some of the time, and has a debilitating bug where the focus is lost if you change to another app with mozilla mimimised, stopping you using the keyboard.

    Mac-OS has a massive userbase of low coputer-literacy 'creative' people who bought a mac for usability and are highly resistant to retraining to OSX, but since OSX is a much nicer development environment, all the programmers were very quick to jump ship. It would certainly make my life easier if I could migrate all the designers I look after to Mozilla.

    So, is there a bounty for a Mac-OS port out there, or how do I start one and get it noticed by potention developers/contributors?
    • I'd like to invest in getting a recent version of Mozilla ported to Mac-OS.

      Is this a troll?

      I suggest you go to Mozilla.org [mozilla.org].
    • It may work but it may not. A lot of people believe MacOS fans are the true fanatics, but you have to see what Amigaians will do to their 10 year old hardware to squeeze the last bit of jucie out of them, how they have their workbench hacked to fuggery and back to bring it close to a normal operating system. Amiga's have touched a lot of people and for some reason, a lot of people come back and visit every now and then, and some get sucked back in. Its a strange force, more powerful than any force in exista

  • Cocaine, Move Over (Score:3, Funny)

    by occamboy ( 583175 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @04:33PM (#7774573)
    I believe that Robin Williams said that "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you have too much money."

    Move over cocaine: you've been eclipsed!
  • Rumor has it a certain Mr. Flinstone will pay $1 million dollars to the first person to port mozilla to "that wooden calculator with the bird inside."

  • Poor slashdot attitude (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oobar ( 600154 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @05:02PM (#7774767)
    There seem to be a lot of responses along the lines of "(sigh) Why oh why are resources being wasted on this? Can't they work on the mainstream platform instead? Imagine what that money could do..." This completely misses the point. The donor behind this obviously sees some need or desire to see Moz on the Amiga, and is willing to put his money where his mouth is. If you don't agree, fine. If you want to see mainline Mozilla development continue, then donate to the Mozilla Foundation. Otherwise don't complain about a perceived injustice to something provided to you for free.

    It's like complaining about how muscular dystrophy is such a worthless cause and all those losers who donated to MD research could have made a bigger impact if they'd contributed to AIDS research instead.
  • Considering how many *useful* open source projects could use some funding, this is a really silly waste..

    Now, if somebody would collect money to sponsor the completion of full SVG support in Mozilla, THAT is something I'd be more than willing to donate to. And it would help more than a tiny handful of people.
    • Then why the hell don't you go start a fund drive for one of your more 'worthy' projects? Obviously the people who started this, along with the people who have donated wan't it, they are under no obligation to spend their money in whatever way you see fit.

  • I said it in the past... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Saturday December 20, 2003 @05:34PM (#7774971) Homepage
    ...I'll say it again.

    I used to code quite a bit on the Amiga. I would love to get back into the show and donate my time and my help (if I could be any help at all) to a worthwhile opened source Amiga project.

    I'll get started the moment they ACTUALLY deliver that new and exciting entry into personal computers that they've been promising for years.

    Oh, and sneak peaks at "Maybe Almost Sort of Available Hardware that only runs Linux at the moment" doesn't count.

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