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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Announcements and Press Releases => Topic started by: System on July 16, 2005, 02:48:17 PM
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Nova Design is selling Aladdin 4D into Open Source! We're talking source code, trademarks and everything! Nova Design, Inc. has put the entire rights and source code to one of their top software titles, Aladdin 4D, on an exclusive offer to the Open Aladdin 4D group (www.openaladdin4d.com) who are raising the money for it.
Nova originally purchased Aladdin 4D in the mid-1990s from Adspec, Inc. and then heavily upgraded and modernized to make it even more powerful and easy to use. Aladdin 4D has many advanced tools for professional 3D animation, yet its interface was designed to be easy for anyone to use. The source code for Aladdin 4D was designed to be as portable as possible. Adspec, under contract, once ported Aladdin 4D to the Transputer board and also did a special Intel processor rendering engine even. Aladdin 4D has already had it's rendering engine test-compiled under Linux, MacOS X and other platforms in the past. The source code is highly standard C source code - no assembly required.
The initial money raised through donations will be collected by the Open Aladdin 4D group, headed up by Nate Downes, and will be used to purchase Aladdin 4D from Nova Design. Nova has set the amount at only $37,579.83 which, as they've stated, is going to be used by them to pay off old bills. Compared to amounts raised for other Open Source projects, this is minor. Also, any money raised beyond this goal will be used for site costs, and rewards and bounty programs to encourage porting and further development of Aladdin 4D. We have plans for Aladdin's future, never fear!
Nova Design's own Kermit Woodall is participating as an advisor and has also agreed to turn over all of the source code for unreleased/uncompleted new features and modules for Aladdin 4D. Additionally all concepts and designs for other features will be freely given over as well.
This project can succeed. Aladdin 4D can be saved from becoming abandonware and grow beyond the old 68k Amiga platform.
Please visit the Open Aladdin 4D site at www.openaladdin4d.com and donate today. The sooner we hit the goal, the sooner we'll have Aladdin 4D on multiple platforms and being upgraded again!
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Very interesting and a nice idea for those companies who cant warrant giving source code away.
Dont know if your going to manage to raise £21,500 from just Amiga users though...
GOOD LUCK!!!! :-)
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Thanks Oli - we're not depending on just Amiga users - the Open Aladdin 4D guys are going after Linux, Mac and Windows as well.
If you consider all of those markets, then it might not be too hard for the OA4D guys to reach that goal!
Kermit
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If you consider all of those markets, then it might not be too hard for the OA4D guys to reach that goal!
Very true, which is great for us Amiga users too as we could let the Linux guys do all the upgrade work and then just recompile it for the A1, hehehe. :-D