The WArMUP Association launches a big bounty to boost development on MorphOS (ports or native development).

To launch a project, MorphOS users must make a donation using the "Donate" button placed in the Bounty box of WArMUp site, mentioning the name or type of project they would like to see happen on MorphOS.

The list of projects and amounts will be put in a block on the right with the total amount of the bounty.

The developers can of course propose a project would like realize.

The donor can at any time move the amount he has given to another project if the one he has chosen is not realisable or he no longer likes it by writing to the address papiosaur2 at hotmail.fr.

If a developer does not have a machine to realize a project, the association can provide him with one (shipping costs to him).

It's up to you to boost development on MorphOS.

Papiosaur
http://www.warmup-asso.org

[ Edité par Papiosaur 30.12.2016 - 16:02 ]

I like the idea, and your enthusiasm in trying to spur more development for MorphOS, but I don't think that bounty money is what is holding back development. Instead, I believe that a lack of free time and of qualified MorphOS developers, is what is holding back the development of the OS, and third party software.

Finding new programmers who are willing to learn the MorphOS system and wanting to contribute by coding new software, or porting existing software to MorphOS, is one of our biggest challenges. If you can come up with new ways to find and recruit some programmers, to join our community, that would be more useful than setting up bounties, which our existing developers do not have time or energy to fulfill.

If finding and recruiting new programmers was easy, we would have done so already, so I do not make this suggestion lightly. I know how hard it can be to find new programmers, or even new users, who would want to join our community, but I suggest that the Warmup group discuss my suggestion, and try to come up with ideas to find new programmers and users, then take actions to actually recruit new programmers and users into the MorphOS community. Please discuss this with the other Warmup members.

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Agree... And new programmers won't join, until no memory protection, no comparable supported HW, no IDE, no debbugger, ...
I hope, the dev. guys are (or will in the next year) busy working on the architecture change!

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You might be right, but I don't like statements that express absolutes, when the future remains unknown and anything is possible. Memory protection, support for more modern hardware, a better IDE, and a debugger are all things that will help us recruit new programmers, but it does not mean that there is nothing we can do toward recruiting new users, programmers, and potential new MorphOS Dev. Team members, while those things you mention are being created, or worked on. We do have a few users (and possibly 1 or 2 programmers) who have joined the MorphOS community within the last 10 or so years, who did not have any previous Amiga, or MorphOS experience, so the concept is possible, though it is unlikely, and rare, to have such people join us.

I have confidence that our MorphOS Dev. Team members are working on the future of MorphOS, as much as their busy lives will allow.

I would like to suggest that if there are any MorphOS Dev. Team members, who are currently unemployed, or any who become unemployed in 2017, to let the community know of their situation, because I believe that we could find enough MorphOS users who would be willing to donate a monthly amount toward paying a full time salary to such unemployed MorphOS Dev. Team member, in exchange for them working full time on MorphOS3.10, until they are able to find new employment. I would be willing to donate $40 to $50 per month to such a MorphOS Dev. Team member, and I think that 50 to 100 other MorphOS users might also be willing to donate a similar amount, if it meant we would have a full time programmer working on MorphOS3.10.

I am not suggesting that any of the MorphOS Dev. Team members quit their jobs and ask the community to provide them with a monthly salary, instead of them working a regular job, just suggesting that if any team members would lose their jobs be given some funds to support work on MorphOS3.10 full time, until a new job could be found.

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I think, MOS is a nice light weight system. It isn't strange, if somebody changes his (or her) mind and decides to join us. The lots of people hates the mainstream operating systems, because of their complexity/unreliablity.
I don't know your past, but I also joined to the MOS community a few years ago. I have a little amigan past. (I sold my 1200 in 1995). I was a big Linux enthusiast, but was changing my mind about Linux, when I heard about MOS.

By the way, you're right... It is hard to predict the future.
I just would like to remind you to the forum thread, where a dev. guy wrote down his experiences about MOS, and why did he decide to not stay.

I think, if we want some developers to join, we need to have a system, which is nice to use for development. Robustness is a must. It is really annoying, when a little memory bug make the system hang and you need to restart the system in every 5 minute. The other thing is a debugger. It is a pain in the a**, when we don't know what is going on, and need to put log messages everywhere, then recompile, then execute, then... instead of just starting a debugger. I'm enough enthusiast to deal with these problems, but other guys aren't...

Hello,

Happy New Year to begining to all MorphOS users and others of course

I think if each bounty contened 500 euros, many new developpers will be interested by MorphOS

It's a big bounty to speak of MorphOS around us.

Maybe MorphOS Team could donate a little money ?

The money of the bounty must be used to new development on MorphOS, if a developper didn't have work, he can propose of course a new project and the money can move to this new project if donators are ok.

But we need donators...for the moment i'm alone...

Where is the MorphOS community ?





[ Edité par Papiosaur 01.01.2017 - 19:41 ]

500€ are nice pocket money if your allready into MorphOS, but as a deciding factor for someone to join as a developer it falls a few 0 short.

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I agree! 500 euros is a nice amount for someone who is only a hobby programmer, but for real programmers, who make their living coding, 500 euros is only two or three days wages. Also, Papiosaur, you are not alone, but most people do not wish to donate to a blind bounty fund, and are more likely to donate to a bounty for specific work, with milestones and specific goals spelled out clearly, so they know what they will get back from their donation. I don't mean to be negative, as I do support your efforts, and appreciate that you always try to figure out ways to help development in our community, so please do not take my criticism, or alternative suggestions as an attack against you, or your ideas. I often think about different ideas that might help increase development, or better recruitment of users and programmers, into our community, but great ideas are hard to find sometimes, and harder still to get agreement from other users.

Collecting money where there is no specific developer assigned to any specific project? Makes no sense to me.

@pampers : the collect of money is destinated to projects or developpers have a project.

jacadcaps has proposed recently a project, i have added his project to the projects list, if nobody is interested to port ScummVM 1.9.0, DuneLegacy 0.96.4, UFO-AI 2.5, Gigalomania 0.28, SimpleMail 0.43 or SDL 2, i will transfert the money to his bounty.

[ Edité par Papiosaur 02.01.2017 - 13:47 ]

IMO there is a substantial lack of devs. Not only new but past also, ie Fab has been very quite the recent years (ofc with for a good and happy reason :)). Nevertheless, MorphOS lacks software less than OS advantages itself. TBH I haven't been bothered for many years regarding the absence of memory protection due to the fact that the software I choose to use is well developed and crash free (touch wood) so far. Therefore I would love to see progress in the software area, rather than the OS itself. I hope devs will be picking small bounties or develop their own software solutions instead of improving the PPC line (x64 is a different story:)). For example the jit javascript would be neat, expose as Jaca has proposed on another thread would be cool, an e-mail proggie that will connect to gmail and the likes would be awesome. If someone could team up to speed up progress for Final Writter again it would be very welcomed. SDL 2 is fine too. Quake 2 HD think is coming on OS4 from HunoPPC (if it hasn't arrived yet). Would be nice to have on MorphOS. There are also versions of open source games that could updated: DuneLegacy among them, but also FreeCiv, Frogatto, Battle for Wesnoth to make some honorable mentions). Hope the situation improves the following months and 2017 marks a year of active development.

@Papi

We had few examples that collecting money with hope, that some developer will be interested, makes no sense. Damn, even collecting money while the developer is interested doesn't mean necessarily a success.

I think the only and working way now is the same as Jaca is doing, expressing interest, giving price.

@pampers : i'm ok with you, a proposition by the developer is the best way. Unfortunaly, for the moment there only one proposition. I would like propose various projects for this new year. I would like a maximum of projects are realized. If others dev propose projects, i will add to the list.

@Papi, forgot to ask, why do you have SDL 2 on the list while it's already available?

SDL 2 is not complete....

I put 10€ to start

@Papiosaur:
Could you provide an eMail address to donate for the bounty?
Pressing on the donate button results in a french paypal site, and I don't see a way to switch to german/english.

Also I would prefer to donate "as a friend" so you would get the full amount without paypal getting an extra fee.

@pampers : yes i put SDL2 because is not complete, if Itix continu the port, the bounty will be for him of course.

@igracki : you have an International button on http://www.warmup-asso.org. If you prefer, this is the paypal account: warmup.asso@gmail.com . Thanks to write "Boost MorphOS Dev 2017" and your project in comment please.

> MorphOS lacks software less than OS advantages itself. [...] Therefore I
> would love to see progress in the software area, rather than the OS itself.

;-)

> [...] instead of improving the PPC line (x64 is a different story:)).

Most improvements would be ISA-agnostic anyway.

> For example the jit javascript would be neat

That of all things is PPC-specific.

> Quake 2 HD think is coming on OS4 from HunoPPC (if it hasn't arrived yet).

Has been there for 1½ years.

http://hunoppc.amiga-projects.net/content/quake-ii-version-spéciale-improved-rendering-hd-amigaos4

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It seems SimpleMail 0.43 for MorphOS is already being worked on (see a1k.org):

http://www.ancientspledge.com/simplemail-git-mos.lha

Yeah I'm currently working with henes to port SimpleMail to MOS again. This is a beta from latest GIT only, also some people already found some bugs, and the OpenSSL version I used is the latest, but not the official one. News soon!

And guys, it's not so bad to work with/develop on MOS. Also it's quite easy to create a cross-development environment. The matured APIs might seem a bit outdated, but they are also stable and learnable. MUI is in my eyes a very well structured UI system even if there's no RAD-IDE for it.

About the memory protection it might be nice to have it for debugging or other stuff but for experienced programmers there are also other ways to find out the origin of problems. Furthermore there is a Debug Log and serial output/RAMDebug if the system completely hangs.

MOS is from its core an extremely effective and open system. You can even talk with most programmers on IRC in private if you have questions or problems and everyone tries to do as much as he can.

Honestly, don't paint it black, guys. The donations here are, used wisely, a good motivation for people to work on stuff.

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Very Cool !!!! i test it as soon as possible

I have been thinking of a bounty, myself.
But I won't post it unless I can start with about !0% of the $5000 I think it would be worth.
I'd like to see the TinyGL library upgraded to OpenGL ES capability.

To me, this would be more useful than Jacek's proposal.

Right now, if I wanted an easier to use desktop, I'd buy a larger monitor and increase my screen resolution or add a second monitor.
But being able to recompile OpenGL ES based software would be priceless.

This doesn't mean I wouldn't consider supporting Jacek's idea as well, or any other good ideas.

But I do understand the idea of having a forum or mechanism that allows us to make, promote, or support such proposals, and I don't think the discussion is wasted time.

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Is this proposal of yours mean that YOU would be working on coding this upgrade of the TinyGL library?

I think it would be a great idea, but others more knowledgeable than myself will know if upgrading the TinyGL library to OpenGL ES capability is feasible, and if it is desirable for porting more software to MorphOS. I seem to remember some earlier discussion of this topic, or similar topics, where I was confused regarding just how the TinyGL library works, and what is practically possible as an upgrade path for MorphOS (not surprising, as I am easily confused these days).

If you are thinking of working on this yourself, I would be interested in helping out in any way that I can. I have purchased a couple of books within the last 18 months or so, specifically for OpenGL programming, and have thought several times in the past, that working with someone else, or with a group of others, would be a good way to motivate myself to improve my programming skills. I would not be of much help, but I imagine that there are some tasks in any programming project that are simple, tedious, and time consuming, that almost anyone can do, given a small amount of direction and supervision, so I might be able to help with such tasks in some small way. I would not want any part of any bounty money raised for such project. Just the learning experience would be enough compensation for me.

@amigadave

I'd say there are only 3 maybe 4 people (cyfm,jaca, bigfoot and ???) who have both access those parts of the system AND the skills to pull it off.

Also not to be rude (as much fun as that can be from time to time), just buying some books makes you as usefull for such a project as placing those same books under the short foot of your desk.....

Want to improve your skills ? Think up project that you consider to be doable in a month and than report back next year (just an observation on how long I-could-do-that-in-2-weeks-projects tend to take in real life).