Wanted: Developers to port ArtEffect and StormC to AmigaOS4

[bhoggett]

@Kronos

doesn't H&P have 1 or 2 paid developers with Amiga-experience ?

Various posts on various mailing lists over the past two years or so would indicate that the enswer to that question is "no".  I don't think they've had any in-house developers since the guy who ported UAE to QNX to get AmigaXL left them.

Mind you, if I was thinking of developing anything for AmigaOS4, I'd think long and hard before dealing with H&P on that basis.

[bhoggett]

@Neko

What I want to know is...

... how much will they pay me to do it?

All well and good doing it for the Good of the Community, but a kitty's got to eat.

I can't answer for H&P, but most likely the answer is "payment will be royalty based only". In other words, you do the work in your own time and you take the risk that low sales may fail to compensate you sufficiently for the man-hours you put into it.  That was certainly the kind of deal H&P proposed the last time they asked for programmers (they were going to port a log analysing tool to OS4, did anyone hear anything more about that?), and it seems to be their company policy these days.

All I'd say to anyone planning to take this on is: make sure you have a solicitor vet any contract H&P send you before you sign it. You don't want it to contain the usual ambiguities their contracts tend to have, or you may end up regretting it.

Personally, while I think that adding a good IDE to gcc and gdb is pretty crucial in encouraging new developers, I'd prefer to see an open source effort. Depending on a company whose commitment is questionable and whose attitude is highly questionable is not a wise course of action.

[bhoggett]

@Rogue

The existence of a commercial IDE does not prevent an open-source one from emerging. I'm sure there are a few open-source candidates for that that could be converted

I know. The point I was making was that if the developer will be expected to work for nothing (or just the measly "royalties" he'll get from a port)  he may wish to consider porting one of the open source candidates. This would also have the overall advantage to the community that the IDE would not be glued to the compiler and so new versions could be plugged in as they are developed, something which is not currently possible with StormC AFAIK.

Under the current climate, working for royalties and being published by a company who are not investing anything in the platform may not be the wisest move.  Now, if that publisher was to pay the developer up-front for his work, or according to a fixed contract, that would be another matter.