Guest post by Another important bounty quota has been reached in the Power2People website, and this time the result comes from a common effort of the whole Amiga/Morphos/AROS Community. The result of this bounty being reached is that the Poseidon USB stack will be ported to AROS, and released as open source under the AROS Public License.
On April 2008 Chris Hodges proposed on the AROS-exec forum a bounty to open source his USB stack Poseidon, and port it to AROS; it also set a monetary goal to do the job: $4000.
The bounty was accepted, but after one year, the donations for the bounty were stuck at around $2400 and the need of a better working and more complete USB stack was quite felt from the users and developers. In order to promote further donations the bounty fundraiser was advertised on most of the Amiga forums worldwide and even a promotion was started where every donation was doubled to speed up the process.
the Amiga community members’ response has been overwhelming: in less than a week the goal has been reached; right now, the bounty is at $4170. Chris has started work on the AROS port, and once finished, the code will be released under the APL license. It is really nice that the importance of the bounty was understood by most of the community members: the Poseidon stack represents an important resource not only for AROS but for all three communities, who will now be able to access the code, port it, and improve it.
So far bounty systems in the Amiga world provided funding for big efforts in a similar way that big entities’ funding usually provides in the Linux/BSD world. In the hope that the current community-driven improvements will bring more people and hopefully bigger entities to use and develop on the Amiga and like platforms in the future, I would like to thank all the people who contributed to reach this goal and that further cooperation and reciprocal support will arise.
All Amiga/AROS people, where are you?
It would be nice to have at least one comment from someone who is involved.
About the funding itself: kind of makes one pitiful when big multinational corporations are pouring money into certain already well-funded FOSS projects, but at the same time smaller projects have difficulties raising tiny amounts of money to fund their development.
Here I have enormous respect to Google and their SoC.
Companies have little incentive to fund small projects such as AROS or Syllable because there is little prospect of a return on their investment. Although sad, it’s true.
Well I’m an Amigan but it’s not THE special news for me because the USB stack which is integrated into AmigaOS4.x is still good. So personally I don’t need another stack (though Poseidon is more advance).
But in the AROS point of view it will be great.
Assuming the creator of Poseidon hasn’t changed his mind, this means that AROS should now be getting a complete and powerful USB stack. Having a fairly major system in a completely “done” state should be very useful, as should the various fixes to various bits of AROS that will doubtlessly be needed to make it all work.
hey peep
Gotta a question.. I would like to be an amigian back as i was in the days..
I was looking for getting an amiga 1200 + a cf adapter for playing GOOD games (no xbox360 nor ps3 for me thanks), I read some of you are running os 4.x, I wonder on top of which hardware are you running it, is it through emulation?
thanks in advance!
I would post your question on a forum like at http://www.amigaworld.net
You will get the information you want there.
Edited 2009-05-26 14:47 UTC