OSNews

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.