As recently noted by Haiku developer Axel Dörfler on the development mailing list, Teldar Corporation has open sourced their BeServed network file sharing solution for BeOS and donated the code to Haiku. We are now pleased to announce that the donated code has been merged into the Haiku repository, and is available here. The package, donated to Haiku under the MIT license, contains user management and servers for several operating systems including, Microsoft Windows® and Linux®. While Haiku already has a native networking file system that has been in the works by Ingo Weinhold, the availability of the BeServed code will allow cross-pollination between the two code bases, eventually resulting in а powerful and solid native networking solution for Haiku.

Kevin Musick of Teldar Corporation had these words for us: "I am pleased to donate BeServed in its entirety to the Haiku project. After Be, Inc.'s demise, BeServed was no longer commercially viable and the pressures of my career and a young family forced me to pursue other opportunities. However, I am encouraged to see Haiku's progress and the ongoing commitment of the community. While I no longer have the bandwidth to participate in the project, I hope that BeServed will be useful in some small way. Congratulations on your progress and best wishes for continued success!"

After a quite intensive and challenging review and selection process, we are pleased to announce that Haiku has been assigned five (5) student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008. This year, Google accepted many more mentor organizations than ever before, which made the allotment of students slots a lot more competitive. We also received applications of very high quality, which is definitely a blessing, but also made the Haiku mentor's task of narrowing down to a final selection much tougher. After thorough review of all the applications, and carefully taking into consideration factors such as immediate benefits for our project, the likelihood of getting long-term contributors, and the availability of an appropriate mentor for any given project, we have come up with the final list of students that will be coding for Haiku during the GSoC 2008 program. Here it is:

Scott at the Haiku booth

I spent this past weekend in San Francisco in order to attend the LugRadio Live USA 2008 event. Together with Scott McCreary (of BeDrivers.com fame), we organized a Haiku booth to represent the project at this the first LugRadio Live event to be held in the US. This event was a bit of a mystery to me, in the sense that I did not know what to expect. It certainly turned out to be an interesting and fruitful experience, not only because of the usual increased visibility that results from having a booth at any open source event, but also because it gave us the chance to get to know and network with quite a few interesting individuals.

I drove into San Francisco on Friday afternoon, as I wanted to check out the exhibit floor at the Metreon and also see if I could setup our projector screen in our booth in advance. We were originally told that there would be a "no hanging stuff from the wall" policy, but it turned out that it was OK for us to hang the projector screen from the tube holding the backwall drapes behind our booth. And that's exactly what I did: with the kind help of one of the on-site crew and a couple of plastic cable straps that I had brought in my show box, I had the screen setup in no time. I spoke with the on-site staff about wireless access, and got all the info that I needed to get my ethernet-wifi adaptor working, so that we could have internet access from Haiku. Once I had the plan for the next day more or less clear in my head, I called it a day, and went back to my hotel room to relax until dinner time.

I admit it: I have a weakness for website statistics. So late last year, I added Google Analytics (GA) to the Haiku website. GA gives you a wide array of information such as number of visits, page views, bounce rates, as well as geographic data and information related to the used operating systems. I wanted to get see this information myself, but I also wanted to share it with the community (don't worry, it's all anonymous data), so that everyone can get a peek at another and different metrics of how our project keeps growing over time. So here is a brief activity overview for the Haiku websites for the January thru March of 2008 period.

With the help of a generous donator, Haiku, Inc. has acquired a major share of Google, Inc. and is now in the process of reorganizing Google for a major focus shift that will allow for wide distribution of Haiku R1 to OEMs. Distribution contracts have been signed with major mobile phone makers for an unprecedented availability of Phone and Handheld Integrated System Haiku (PHISH).

Also, as of this year, the Summer Of Code project is now officially renamed Summer of Assembler Poetry (SoAP).

This is the second installment of the Haiku alpha 1 status updates. In this issue I will discuss the progress on including the developer tools in Haiku. Some interesting progress has been made. I will also expose a discussion on the mailing list on whether or not to release a bootable CD. At the end of the page you will find the enhanced milestone statistics.

David McPaul, on behalf of 3ivx Technologies Pty. Ltd, has just announced on the Haiku mailing list the release of the latest version (5.02) of the 3ivx MPEG-4 ASP video decoder and encoder for the BeOS R5 platform, including an experimental 3ivx decoder for Haiku. Available on the 3ivx website, this release includes many bug fixes, frame accurate seeking, experimental support for mp4 files and aac audio, and a Haiku version of the 3ivx decoder. Haiku versions of the 3ivx decoder and aac decoder are expected to be supported in the future, and a Haiku-specific 3ivx encoder will be released once encoding support is added to the Haiku Media Kit. This is an exciting development, and hopefully just the beginning of a bright future for Haiku in the area of media format support.