Amizilla Information
AmiZilla was an ongoing project which tried to port the Mozilla Firefox browser - and other Mozilla projects - to AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS, and to fund efforts for achieving that goal.
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History
This project started in May 2003 from an idea of DiscreetFX, a firm based in United States (Chicago, Illinois) which supports still existing Amiga Video Toaster market and produces and sells programs and Digital/FX sample collections for amateur, professional and broadcast studios customers. The AmiZilla project started in the form of bounty contest (i.e. donors uses internet online funding & money-transfer resources like PayPal to donate a free amount of money, which will be collected as a whole "booty" sum of money and then used to "pay" the person or the team who proves himself to be capable of realizing the whole project). The project was announced on Amigaworld Portal on 19 May 2003 with an amount of 1000 US Dollars[1], and in only one day it collected 2000 dollars by donations, climbing from 1000 to 3000 dollars [2]. Noteworthy for a very little community of users, by the 11th of June 2003 it had reached more than 4000 US$, and this enormous effort, and the rapid rampage in collecting money by the Amiga users (who were considered a sparse community) was noted also by Mozillazine online news portal [3], and by Slashdot.org online magazine[4]. As of 2007, a port of Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine was achieved, while a recompile of NSPR was in pre-alpha development. In the intentions of the support team, the future goals of the project included better support through the cairo 2D graphics library which is slated for integration into the codebase of Firefox 3 (code-named Gran Paradiso), that was already ported to the Amiga platform. The AmiZilla project was closed November 19, 2009 without realizing significant results mainly due to the retirement of a contribution of $5,000 donated by a former Netscape executive who wanted to keep his anonymity and was tired of waiting for results that never come. The project during its entire life was capable to raise the noteworthy sum of $11,869.64 (as been evidenced in the page of donors at its site[5]). Part of this amount of money was then transferred to TimberWolf browser bounty, and the main part of the money was given back to the former donors. The abrupt closing of the AmiZilla project caused a vaste echo in Amiga community and started a flamewar on Amiga community discussion sites, due to the fact that just some day before Amizilla Project ceased its operations, it were released to public the first screenshots of TimberWolf Browser by Friedens bothers. Some members of the Amiga community thought Timberwolf should be considered as the candidate to win the whole booty amount of money collected by the AmiZilla Project[6]. But many others disagreed since Timberwolf had its own Bounty, set of rules and requirements and was only for Amiga OS 4.1.
Rules
There were some main rules for AmiZilla project to be accomplished by those developers who wanted to achieve the full prize bounty. The main rule was the fact that Amizilla should be a porting of any of the Mozilla/Firefox browsers into Amiga platform, and it should be an Open Source project. the code should be made freely available to any Amiga developer, and easily ported (with any obvious obliged differences) to any actually existing Amiga system such as AROS, AmigaOS 3 for Motorola 680XX family of processors, AmigaOS 4 for PPC family of processors and MorphOS. The project should be realized in C or C++ to grant an easy porting of the code on every platform, and the money had had being divided up to the winning team based on how much work each team member had effectively realized (for example if the anonymous person "Joe Developer" had realized 70% of the coding he had got 70% of the booty). The fact the project had to be multi-platform, and aimed at supporting all the major Amiga operating systems at the same time was the main cause of its lack of success. No any single Amiga developer could had started coding for AmiZilla as a one-man job because the effort to realize a porting of Firefox on all the Amiga systems, it should had been truly an enormous task to be accomplished, and also it was difficult to start a joined team development with various people skilled at the three main Amiga systems due to never dormant grudges that afflicted the Amiga community, that was and still is divided into three main branches (AmigaOS, AROS, MorphOS) and any branch had its loyal supporters.
Results of the AmiZilla project
Despite of its apparent lack of success, the AmiZilla Bounty Project inspired many bounty systems that were created upon AmiZilla's example. It lead a great rampage in Amiga for the funding of any software project and help developers to gain a concrete (or even symbolic) amount of money to get a revenue for their efforts in creating or porting software for Amiga platforms. After AmiZilla there were created bounties for AROS, MorphOS and AmigaOS. Almost the whole AROS Operating System was created by hiring bounties, and also there are still ongoing MorphOS Bounty Projects like "Power2People", or the "Amigabounty.net" for AmigaOS, etc.,etc. The whole Amiga community learned from AmiZilla how to fund the programmers that still work for this computing platform and helping to develop the software that it is needed in Amiga to live on and continue any further software development for this platform.
Other Firefox Projects
A separate effort to port Firefox to AmigaOS 4 was started in early 2009 and still ongoing. It is named "Project Timberwolf". Screen shots and more information about Timberwolf was made public in November 2009, some days before AmiZilla project was closed abruptly, and then, on June 9, 2010, Timberwolf succeeded in its task to porting Firefox on Amiga OS and in fact an Alpha version was made available for free download on pages the Project Timberwolf site[7]. Users of AmigaOS have to get AmigaOS 4.1 Update 2 installed in order to run Timberwolf/Firefox.
References
- ^ "Announce of starting of AmiZilla Project at Amigaworld.net site". DiscreetFx and AmigaWorld.net site. http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=500. Retrieved May 19, 2003.
- ^ "Announcement on OSNews.com stating on May 20, 2003 that AmiZilla Project collected 3000 dollars". OSNews. http://www.osnews.com/story/3604/3000_USD_for_First_Programmer_to_Port_Mozilla_to_AmigaOS. Retrieved May 20, 2003.
- ^ "Announcement on Mozillazine (and update of 11 june)". MozillaZine online news magazine. http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3262. Retrieved June 7, 2003.
- ^ "Slashdot news corner on June 11". Slashdot magazine and The Rest ©, Geeknet, Inc.. http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/03/06/11/128248.shtml. Retrieved June 11, 2003.
- ^ "Page of Donors at AmiZilla Project site". DiscreetFx. http://www.discreetfx.com/amizilla_donors.html. Retrieved August 10, 2008.
- ^ "Announce of ending of AmiZilla Project at Amigaworld.net site". DiscreetFx and AmigaWorld.net site. http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5159. Retrieved November 20, 2009.
- ^ "Announce of Timberwolf Alpha 1 Release". Thomas Frieden and Hans-Joerg Frieden. http://www.friedenhq.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49:timberwolf&catid=35:amigaos. Retrieved June 9, 2010.
External links
- Project Site
- DiscreetFX page for AmiZilla
- AmiZilla Mailing List @ Yahoo Groups
- One developer's weblog, with news on AmiZilla
- Site for Project Timberwolf, effort to port Firefox to Amiga OS 4.1 only
- DiscreetFX site (Creators and Maintainers of the AmiZilla Bounty Project)
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Categories: Web browsers for AmigaOS | Discontinued web browsers
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