A few of you have noticed that a new AmiZilla website was launched recently. The talented artist that created it did a great job. AmiZilla has been a catalyst for change in the Amiga marketplace and an inspiration to all. AmiZilla shocked the Amiga market and even received wide press on Slashdot, Mozilla forums and many other news sites when it was launched in 2003. Many were caught off guard that an Amiga effort could bring in over $10,000 in donations, the Amiga is suppose to dead right?
The Amiga is not dead, the AROS Bounty system, MorphZone Bounties and many other bounty systems were all inspired by AmiZilla and went on to collect thousands of dollars. DiscreetFX did not consider this competition to AmiZilla, in fact we embraced it and put lots of money into AROS Bounties, MorphZone Bounties and many others. The small community that is Amiga proved that it was not giving up and it was willing to pay for quality software to be ported to the Four Headsmen of Amiga.
A paradigm shift occurred in the Amiga market and has been going on ever since. Amiga owners don't mind reaching into their pockets for quality software vs having no software at all. The sad news in all of this is that the dream of AmiZilla has still not been reached. Firefox proved that it is difficult to port and it will take talented programmers time to do it. Progress was made, a CVS was setup, NSPR was ported and other little models of Firefox but the main goal has not been achieved. Talented developers also gave us Sputnik for MorphOS and OWB for Amiga OS 4.0 & 3.9. Their skills are appreciated because the Amiga had no CSS capable browser. The blunt truth of the matter is that programming is hard and developers need to be paid for their time and work. Over $10,000 in bounty collections in the Amiga market is a great achievement but unfortunately it is not enough. Without Firefox running on the Four Headsmen of Amiga we are not taken seriously and miss out on the wealth of plug-ins and respect the web based platform that is Firefox would give us. Even small unknown operating systems like SkyOS have Firefox.
So we have a two new goals for AmiZilla, $15,000 & $20,000. At these higher bounty levels maybe Linux developers will get interested and run an Amiga virtual machine and or even buy an EFIKA running MorphOS 2.0 and or a used system running Amiga OS 4.0. Even a virtual AROS system is free to setup and use on most environments. Maybe an old Amiga developer that feels inspired and loves Firefox will return to Amiga programming to collect the bounty. We don't care how it gets done we just want it completed to help the Amiga marketplace. To help the contest reach a new level we have added another $1000 to the bounty. To reach a goal of $15K & 20K we will also need the help of others that believe in the dream of Firefox for Amiga OS, MorphOS & AROS.
Best regards
DiscreetFX Team
Links
New AmiZilla WebsiteThe Four Headsmen of Amiga
