AmiZilla
Encyclopedia
AmiZilla was an ongoing project which tried to port the Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

 browser - and other Mozilla projects - to AmigaOS
AmigaOS
AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000...

, MorphOS
MorphOS
MorphOS is an Amiga-compatible computer operating system. It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware, including the...

 and AROS
Aros
Aros may refer to:*Aros , a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium*AROS Research Operating System, a free software implementation of AmigaOS* Aros, the original Viking name of Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark...

, and to fund efforts for achieving that goal.

History

This project started in May 2003 from an idea of DiscreetFX, a firm based in United States (Chicago, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

) which supports still existing Amiga Video Toaster
Video Toaster
The NewTek Video Toaster is a combination of hardware and software for the editing and production of standard-definition and high-definition video in NTSC, PAL, and resolution independent formats on Commodore Amiga computers and subsequently on computers running the Windows operating system...

 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
Bounty (reward)
A bounty is a payment or reward often offered by a group as an incentive for the accomplishment of a task by someone usually not associated with the group. Bounties are most commonly issued for the capture or retrieval of a person or object. They are typically in the form of money...

 contest (i.e. donors uses internet online funding & money-transfer resources like PayPal
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....

 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, and in only one day it collected 2000 dollars by donations, climbing from 1000 to 3000 dollars. 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, and by Slashdot.org online magazine.
As of 2007, a port of Mozilla's SpiderMonkey
SpiderMonkey
SpiderMonkey is the code name for the first-ever JavaScript engine, written by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications, later released as open source and now maintained by the Mozilla Foundation.-History:Eich "wrote JavaScript in ten days" in 1995,...

 JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

 engine was achieved, while a recompile of NSPR
Netscape Portable Runtime
In computing, the Netscape portable runtime, or NSPR, a platform abstraction library, makes all operating systems it supports appear the same to Mozilla-style web-browsers. NSPR provides platform independence for non-GUI operating system facilities...

 was in pre-alpha development. In the intentions of the support team, the future goals of the project included better support through the cairo
Cairo (graphics)
cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends...

 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). 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, because 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. 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
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...

 680XX family of processors, AmigaOS 4
AmigaOS 4
AmigaOS 4, , is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partner...

 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 led 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, an alpha release of Timberwolf was made available for free download on pages the Project Timberwolf site. No new Timberwolf releases were made since then.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK