January, 2008

Farewell video: YouTube | Download Project founder, long time leader and Haiku visionary Michael Phipps departed from the project last year. Michael's list of achievements is long: he did not just provide an overall vision for Haiku, but he also set up Haiku Inc., and over the years put in countless hours of work, keeping the development effort on track whenever it seemed to drift away from the goals, and single-handedly managing the infrastructure supporting the project. Without Michael, Haiku would most probably not be what it has become today.

Michael gave his goodbye in a moving letter to the Haiku community but, somehow, it feels as if we never reciprocated with a proper farewell. So we decided to do something special to show our heartfelt appreciation. We are thereby presenting Michael Phipps with the first ever Haiku Recognition Award. This is a very special award with a personal touch, as it has been signed by members of the community present at the recent BeGeistert 018 conference held in Düsseldorf, Germany, and is also accompanied by a farewell video.

We are pleased to announce that the proposal submitted by the recently formed Haiku Java Team to the OpenJDK Porters Group has been accepted by a unanimous vote. This makes Haiku the first OS platform to be sponsored by the Porters Group, and it means that the port is now officially part of the OpenJDK family of projects endorsed by Sun. Referring to the Haiku Java Team proposal, OpenJDK Ambassador for Sun Microsystems Tom Marble said: "I believe that encouraging broad adoption of OpenJDK on as many operating systems and architectures as possible is essential to furthering our goals of Java ubiquity. I'm glad to support this project."

SCaLE 5x, Haiku Tech Talks at Google, Picn*x XVI, CNSL 3 in Venezuela, FISL 8.0 in Brazil, NUMERICA in France, T-DOSE in the Netherlands, Kansai Open Source Forum in Japan. The list of 2007 events where Haiku had a presence is very long. In fact, never in the past has Haiku had so much public exposure as it did during 2007. And as the project keeps making progress towards its first release, this trend of increased exposure before the eyes of the open source and computing world in general is expected — and desired — to continue. In the first two months of 2008 alone, Haiku will be at BeGeistert 018, SCaLE 6x and FOSDEM 2008, not to mention the Haiku hacking event that is taking place this very same week. With very few exceptions, these events are all the result of initiatives by one or more community members.

In an attempt to assist the effort of these community members who drive such initiatives and to lure more of them to follow suit, we have added to the Haiku website the ability to easily publish information about conferences and events, as a means to increase their exposure and as a tool to further engage the participation of the community in this events.

We are very excited to announce the creation of a new project team that will bring Java technologies to the Haiku Operating System. This team was established under the initiative of Haiku developer and team lead Bryan Varner, and is officially endorsed by the Haiku development team. In fact, discussions have taken place between Bryan and the rest of the core Haiku developers to start building synergy to ensure the viability of the Java Team's goals within the Haiku project.

The team's initial goal will be to port OpenJDK to Haiku. We want to have the Haiku port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project, and discussions have been taking place with members of the OpenJDK Porters Group to pursue this objective. After a meeting between Bryan, the Haiku core developers and Dalibor Topic, member and moderator of the Porters Group discussion list, we submitted a proposal in order to find a sponsor member within the Porters Group to make the official proposal to the OpenJDK project as a whole. OpenJDK Groups have two weeks to vote on sponsorship of this proposal. A majority vote is required from one group for approval.