Port Mozilla, Collect $3696 358
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."
fp? (Score:0, Interesting)
$3696 / 160 =~ $23/hr for one month (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good to see the Amiga community still alive (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My Mail to Bill. (Score:4, Interesting)
----
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
Re:My Mail to Bill. And my second reply to him. (Score:2, Interesting)
A last note. I was talking about GRE (Mozilla Gecko) and KHTML (Safari Koqnueror) libraries all the time.
These are full rendering components available as libraries. See it as an object. You write a native Amiga Window, add a toolbar, add a bookmarks system and there where you want to see the rendering stuff, you simply put the HTML rendering object inside. It's like putting a big pushbutton in the middle of the window (adding a gadget to your window). Mozilla don't remain the way it is now the entire 1.4 roadmap changes.
It was:
Mozilla (email, chat, web)
It becomes:
Gecko Runtime Engine
-
|
|-> Firebird
|-> Galeon
|-> K-Meleon (dunno if the stick to it)
|-> Other app if wanted
|-> AmigaOS Browser (MorphOS Browser)
It was:
Konqueror (Web)
It becomes:
the Core
-
|
|-> Konqueror
|-> Safari
|-> Other app if wanted
|-> AmigaOS Browser (MorphOS Browser)
You see you don't need to care for either GRE or KHTML anymore, their developers (usually big teams) keep the rendering engine up to date, keep them fast, keep them cool. And the Amiga, Safari etc. teams add their little backends to it (e.g. wrapper for widgetsets, OS filecalls etc). Even if you can't get your own widgets or filesystem calls inside it, then you still can grab always the ewest core from releases or CVS and have your little changes done externally knowing that you always be able to update from CVS.
1-2 mb of short library including everything ready to render if embedded in your window) compared to 30-40 mb of Mozilla hard to maintain and hard to share functionality amongst other apps. No reinventing of wheels over and over again because the components are all written already. I would tend to say that 1/2 of Mozilla as is now is code for plattform independency (such as own widgetset, own lowerlevel functioncalls etc.) 1/4 is the Widgetsets and Library interfaces for various OS's such as Windows, Mac, Linux and the remaining 1/4 is what really matters. And this 1/4 is being split out of it in a separate library called GRE. (Well I lied with 1/4 here it's probably a bit more but to give you a clue).
Of course porting a big project like Mozilla may attract customers and have them come back to AmigaOS (MorphOS).
Ok I hope I was informative and I hope you understand the translations of the replies I gave to www.amiga-news.de.
thought it might be a interesting project... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:$4000? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Port Firebird/Phoenix to Classic Mac (Score:3, Interesting)
-Jetset
-I can't hear the forest now for all the falling trees
Righto (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:thought it might be a interesting project... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not port khtml instead? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Because the Amiga community, despite everything they've gone through still has a passion for their platform. If (not likely admittedly) Microsoft went bust tommorrow, do you think there would be die hard users doing this sort of thing for the Windows platform 10 years later?
This passion speaks volumes about the qualities inherent in the Amiga archiecture and OS.
Re:Port Firebird/Phoenix to Classic Mac (Score:2, Interesting)
If only a few of those people would stop porting linux to hairdryers, making tcp/ip stacks made out of christmas tree lights and casemodding PCs into happy meal toys, the open source movement could really get a strong foothold in the Mac market
If there was a port Moz to OS9 fund, I'd donate to it.