It's official! Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine. This is one more student than last year's eight sponsored by the GSoC alone! Shown below are the four selected students and their projects, in the order that the community ranked them through the Haiku Code Drive poll:

Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API

Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port

Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation

JiSheng Zhang: DV media node

The response from the community to our call for donations to fund this program was incredible. In just two weeks, we received 120 donations from 24 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA), for a total of approximately $7,500. The promptness, degree of generosity, and global reach of the response by the community to the Haiku Code Drive is unprecedented in the history of our project, and hopefully a sign of things to come in the future.

It's been one week since we kicked off the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program, and the response so far has been absolutely awesome: in just seven days the community has contributed more than US$5,000 to fund the program, and the donations keep coming in! This is happening thanks to the generosity of the community, and now you have the opportunity to influence where you want the funds that you donated to go:

The Haiku Code Drive 2008 Poll has started and will run until May 29, 11:59 (US PST), so go cast your vote now! You will need to login, so if you don't have an account with the Haiku website, this is a good time to create one from here.

I am pleased to announce that a new Haiku User Group is being started in Chicago. The Evanston Haiku User Group (eHUG) is the second user group in the US focused on the Haiku operating system, and we have a temporary website at ehug.wordpress.com. We are very similar to other user groups already in existence, but one of the differences between the eHUG and other HUGs is the fact that one of our primary goals is to design and build a computer specifically for Haiku. We currently have two members and the president of the group is Yuri Wordsmith, myself.

This weekend, the Haiku project has seen some nice leaps forward. Two items are especially noteworthy: Ingo Weinhold and Axel Dörfler have finally nailed bug 2059. This bug specifically prevented serious use of Haiku for anything else than testing, since it meant that the kernel could crash at any time, especially when there was heavy disk activity. All that was supposed to be written to disk at the time of the crash was lost. Luckily, due to prior fixes to the file system journaling and log replay, it didn't mean that your entire file system would be corrupted, but at least anything that you were working on at the time would be lost. So the fix for this particular bug is getting us much closer to our goal of a usable self hosting situation in which you can actually use Haiku for development. This is our most important goal to reach before we wanted to release the first alpha of R1.

The second noteworthy achievement is build system support for a mixed GCC4/GCC2 Haiku environment. It has been known for quite some time, thanks to the explorations of Haiku developer Michael Lotz, that it was possible to set up a GCC4 build of Haiku to run GCC2 applications or vice versa, by installing the respective libraries into certain places so that the correct versions are used for linking. What was missing was support in the runtime loader (the system component used to launch applications and link them to the shared libraries that they use) to do this automatically and on a system wide level. Also missing was support in the build system to effortlessly produce such a hybrid Haiku build. Both of these items have now been implemented by Haiku developer Ingo Weinhold. Also related to this, Michael Lotz had researched the stability issues that GCC4 builds of Haiku were suffering from some time ago and tracked them down to a problem in the specific GCC4 version that Haiku is using. They can be avoided by simply turning off a certain compiler optimization feature. All this combined means Haiku can use GCC4 itself while maintaining our stated goal of binary compatibility to the large pool of GCC2 applications in an automated and transparent fashion.

A few serious issues remain before we can release the first alpha. Some concern missing or buggy functionality that affect the self hosting goal with regards to the development tool chain. A completely native port of Subversion is the last item on this list. As far as I know, some bugs in the TCP implementation are preventing it, but progress is being made on this front as you read this. Formal testing is being conducted to make sure the entire tool chain will work correctly and reliably. Axel Dörfler is currently working on the device manager, the system component which manages everything concerning hardware and drivers. There are some issues with regards to hardware interrupts that, when fixed, will hopefully clear up some driver problems that can be experienced on certain hardware.

I want to conclude with a big "Thank You" to everyone who is helping with tracking and reporting issues in our bug tracker and to everyone providing patches and of course to the Haiku developers themselves! Personally, I am very excited about the progress that is being made. Thanks to everyone who is contributing towards this goal!

Google assigned Haiku five student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008, so we had to narrow down our final choice from the many high quality student applications. This was tough: many good applications had to be left out, and we really hate leaving people out, particularly those who had shown an interest in Haiku. So we started entertaining the idea of sponsoring a few of these students ourselves. Today we introduce you to the Haiku Code Drive 2008, a program designed to raise funds from the community in order to sponsor students to produce code for Haiku. This is how it's going to work.

We contacted all the GSoC students that applied for Haiku but did not make it, and asked them if they were interested in carrying out their proposed project for a $2,500 stipend each. From their response, we have created this list of students and their projects; these are the candidates for the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program. Now we are asking you, the Haiku community, to fund the program by making donations. We will then hold a public poll so that the community can influence which candidates/projects they want to sponsor. At the end of the poll/donation period, we will determine how many and which of the students will be sponsored based on the donated funds and the results of the poll. Check out all the details of the program here, including a timeline with tentative dates.

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: