AmiZilla

» see amizilla.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

AmiZilla was a prize before it was ever a program. On 19 May 2003 DiscreetFX, a small Chicago firm otherwise known for Amiga video hardware, posted an offer on AmigaWorld.net: $1,000 to the first programmer who delivered a working Mozilla-based browser for Amiga systems. Within a day the pot had tripled. By 11 June it stood at $3,696 and Slashdot had picked it up under the headline "Port Mozilla, Collect $3696".

Money kept arriving for years afterward. An anonymous donor described only as a former Netscape executive put in $4,205.61, more than a third of the eventual total. By the time DiscreetFX published its final donor list the pot had reached $11,869.64. For a platform whose vendor had been liquidated in 1994, that is a startling sum to raise from enthusiasts on pledges alone.

Nobody ever collected it. The rules were published and a SourceForge CVS repository was opened, but by the project's own account very little code was committed to it. Six years of pledges bought one working port of SpiderMonkey, Mozilla's JavaScript engine, finished around 2007, plus an NSPR build that reached pre-alpha and stopped. No browser was released under the AmiZilla name at any point.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the money piled up ~

The pledge curve is the most legible thing about this project. $1,000 on 19 May 2003, $2,000 within a day, $3,000 by 20 May, $3,696 by the Slashdot story on 11 June. A second Slashdot story that December was headlined around a single donation: "Former Netscape Executive gives $4000 to AmiZilla", and the pot crossed $8,400. OSNews recorded $9,507 in a progress update on 28 June 2005. The final figure on DiscreetFX's donor page was $11,869.64.

That donor page is still served today, unmaintained, at discreetfx.com. amizilla.org no longer resolves at all.

~ what got built ~

I was at university for almost the entire run of this bounty, and the part of it I can actually judge is the toolkit problem. Mozilla's widget layer wanted GTK. AmigaOS had MUI and Reaction. So the volunteers set about writing a GTK to MUI translation layer, which is a second full porting project stacked underneath the first one, and a student group at King's College London took a run at a Reaction version of it. Neither layer was finished.

That is a failure shape familiar to anyone who has tried to make a large codebase speak to a platform it has never heard of, and it does not care how much money is in the pot.

~ the day it closed ~

On 19 November 2009 DiscreetFX announced on AmigaWorld.net that AmiZilla was over. The stated cause was the anonymous Netscape donor withdrawing a contribution of roughly $5,000 after losing patience with the absence of results. Part of what remained was transferred to the Timberwolf bounty and the rest went back to the people who had pledged it.

The timing was cruel in a small way. Timberwolf, a separate bounty aimed only at AmigaOS 4.1, had published its first screenshots days earlier, which set off an argument in the Amiga community about whether it should simply be handed AmiZilla's unclaimed pot. It was not, and it went on to ship a beta in February 2012 under its own rules. The real technical death had come three years before the formal one: the SourceForge development page carries a last-updated stamp of 31 August 2006 and never moved again.

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