The Unix Porting Project has refunded cash to subscribers after few third party developers stepped in to aid the RISC OS Firefox port.Peter Naulls told his subscribers over the weekend: "Sadly, since no one else has taken any interest in developing Firefox besides me, there isn't too much I can do about that until I get through a bunch of more important stuff."
He added: "That is why I am no longer taking subscriptions, and have refunded and cancelled most of those made this year through PayPal."
Users who had donated cash to the project were eager to learn of the status of the open source web browser port, of which a sixth beta release was hoped to appear in November 2005. Peter began taking money from people to fund the project in March last year, and the first beta version was made available months later in June.
The lack of interest in helping Peter complete his Firefox port could be down to a number of reasons: one being that because Peter asked for donations, it was felt to be his own product and project. Alternatively, it could be that the availability of the port's source code is relatively unknown, or the source code was large and unwieldy enough to scare off potential programmers. Last week Peter praised "the nature of open source" for enabling him to produce a Linux port of Tom Walker's RiscPC emulator, although declined to make the source code of that particular project immediately available.
Peter moved from Cambridge to California at the end of summer last year with his family.
Links
Firefox port website