Amiga developers and coders only

We created a new group for Amiga developers and coders only! We don't want to offend nobody but if you are not affiliated with programming don't bother to join. If you are one and you have experience with AmigaOS,c,c++,assembler(!) then please join! We need software,software,software!

Our main purpose is to port software from Linux -> AmigaOS and then release the code on OS4depot,net, who knows it grows bigger and eventually start a fundraiser project on kickstarter.com!

Amiga back for the future; with software....

Join here
Generation Amiga 'developers portal'

@Joeled

Facebook!!!

/me runs away screaming...

@Joeled

That was my response as well. You don't generate revenues by hiding in a hole, you increases expectation you by creating and showing your potential users what some thing they are interested in.

There are too many pocket universes already, this makes marketing and selling, and getting users to sponsor bounties and other types of crowd funding hard. For the developers, who like to make few bucks on this.

As for the cooperate model, does not work, as there too few users fund the development to make that happen.

Anyway I created database-org.com, to cover the range of things, that is useful to developer, user feedback, a way to track bugs, and a way to provide different versions of software.

The marketing aspect of the site is lacking I know, and maybe some can be done to improve the layout, and improvement on the user feedback notification. There the site needs work to share the project page, and allow more developers and people to help out with moderation. And so on, and so on.

@LiveForIt

Not my choice im just helping out. Love it or hate it but thats the way it is for now.

Sounds like some elite group as "dont bother" :)

I hope it gets many developers and that some work gets done. Not that i have much fate in it. I hope im wrong.

Well, you'll have to excuse me, but what is the point of "simply" porting linux software to Amiga?

I was under the impression that most Amiga users use the system to run software that is unique to the platform. I mean, if I wanted to run Linux software, wouldn't it be easier to buy a beige box, install the OS and have full reign of everything available?

Sorry, but I just don't see the reward in "simply" porting foreign software. Surely any bounties or rewards should target native, and exclusive, software. It's not like we are short of any, but the development isn't exactly rewarding.

Reward those that do take the initiative, rather than those than can recompile. There is a massive difference.

Simon

@Joeled

I absolutely agree with Rigo. Plus: despite various attempts to ease Linux porting under OS4 (such as the introduction of the alien and messy .so framework), it has never really caught on to become a trend. So what actually makes you think there is demand for Linux ports?

@Trixie
@Rigo

Dont kill the messenger! We have a bunch of ppl now so lets see whats happening.

@Rigo

While I agree that I agree that not everything needs or should be ported I think there are some things that are available as open source that it would be just stupid not to make use of.

I am talking about proven and reliable open source libraries like libpng, libz, libjpeg, libbz2, AmiSSL (based on OpenSSL), etc.

Using libraries like these does not make your program any less "native". OTOH it saves a lot of time that could otherwise be spent pointlessly reinventing the wheel.

Something I would very much to see is an up to date port of samba using newlib (libsmbclient specifically, I don't really care about the rest). Using libsmbclient one could write a samba file system without having to bother too much with the details of the protocol.

FWIW I am kind of slowly working towards a port of libsmbclient but I keep losing motivation because of the messiness of the source code and the stupid build system which I have chosen mostly to just ignore.

@salass00

Granted, libraries. But of course they make a somewhat different kettle of fish, and they have been ported since forever because as you say, there's no point in reinventing the wheel. Yet a library doesn't equal software (as in "software applications", which I believe is the target of the initiative), it's just an underlying part.

If the library set gets extended through porting then this is perfectly fine, but what I see as lacking here is someone who takes the available fundamentals and builds something from them. We've had ffmpeg for years but still we see few video editors. We've had SoX for years but nobody turns it into an audio processing suite. And so on.

@trixie

Writing a useable GUI video editor is not by any means an easy task though even with decoding and encoding libraries already available.

Take for example Linux which has more developers than AmigaOS has. Last time I tried looking for a video editor I wasn't able to find that many and most if not all of them IIRC were simple GUI affairs built on top of commandline tools.

Also the most promising looking one which I used to edit out ads from some TV recordings caused the audio to go out of sync (not so much at first but gradually adding up for every time there was a section cut out). Unfortunately I didn't notice this before I had burnt all of the recordings to DVD-R and deleted the source files .

I would also like to add that sox and ffmpeg are really useful on their own as command-line programs for converting audio/video files from pretty much any format into pretty much any other format. Also as they are command-line programs they can be used very easily for batch processing in scripts and such.

@trixie

Maybe that´s because there is not enough manpower to develop such software. And there´s not enough hardware power to actually use it, either.

I think the "porting business" is blocking (to a certain amount) native software development. People don´t get the point of the critics against "porting all and everything", because it looks like "easy doin´" for them. Those people can´t see that it is indeed NOT easy to port complex software packages.

@joeled

Maybe you should ask for native software works, too?

Can I bring up a possible program for porting over to AOS4.x?

If this is the wrong place to mention it, I'll delete my post.

It's called InkScape and is a vector drawing program.

It was discussed quite a while ago on AmigaWorld.net.
Look here.

@whose
Quote:
I've always found this idea interesting. In your opinion why is this the case?

@salass00

Quote:
I know. But surely this bounty-driven Facebook initiative would be much more useful if it focused exactly on tasks like that?

@BSzili

Let´s see... native office suite or at least a working and usable word processor program? Never touched because "it´s much easier to port xy!" (e.g. LibreOffice).

Work on printer drivers? Never really touched because of the (how often? One dozen times? Two?) broken promise of CUPS being ported AND working soon... I think there are lots of other examples.

In the end many efforts and time resources are spent on ports, with questionable use and/or success. That doesn´t mean that there are no porting projects with use, in fact there are a few. But those are stuck quite often (Odyssey for example. Or VICE) and always outdated.

There are some native programs/games at least, but IMHO there would be possibly much more, if the main focus would be more on those than it actually is on questionable ports.

@whose
You've thrown in a lot of unrelated things: drivers, unfinished/unmaintained ports, OWB, etc.
There's one fundamental question here: would these people who port applications develop "native" ones if they didn't have existing software to port? The office suite is actually a great example. Do you have any idea how much work would it take to develop a Microsoft or just an OpenDocument-compatible solution from scratch?

@Joeled

I can already hear the crickets chirping. Anyone still developing for OS4 has no incentive to move to this new "developer enclave" you've written about. Facebook is a disaster for managing anything project related. Sounds like you'd actually be competing with already well-established Amiga sites such as this one and A.org and AmigaWorld too. Fragmentation is not an answer to creating more software for a near dead platform.

Developer repositories already exist in the form of git, SVN, etc...Much simpler to create a bounty for a project with a specific goal in mind and manage it via one of the aforementioned repos.

There are plenty of inactive opensource 'Amiga' programs at SourceForge and Github. For example, Timberwolf was made opensource at Github 2 months ago and hasn't been touched since. Amiga fryingpan code is at Sourceforge and was moved to Google.code and then to Github, but I can't see any evidence that any other programmers have joined the project or that any work is being done on the project.

Maybe porting Linux programs that can be updated from the Linux sources is the way to go since it appears that few people have the spare time to work on Amiga programs.

@xenic

That's exactly my point. You learned about most of those inactive projects when the developer(s) made posts to already well-established sites...not from Facebook postings. Developers of inactive projects have already lost any incentive to continue developing/porting so asking them to come and "hang out" at a Facebook page in the hopes that they'll magically find an incentive and the time and money to continue their inactive projects is a bit absurd.

Until there's a consumer demand for OS4 software, Amiga users will have to be content with the current state of software development, or the lack thereof.