donations

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.

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.

We owe a long due recognition to a Haiku contributor who came up with some great ideas, implemented them, and turned them into much needed funding for our project. We are referring to Karl vom Dorff, creator of HaikuBounties.org, a website where contributors can make monetary donations for specific areas of development, and developers can take coding challenges in exchange for the donated bounties. Karl started HaikuBounties.org early this year, and through the course of just a few months, he was able to raise close to $2000!

We want to publicly acknowledge Karl's effort, and thank him for his contributions to advance the Haiku project. Our acknowledgment for Karl's effort comes late, and for that we would like to apologize. We will be looking into hosting the bounty system that Karl designed, and perhaps even integrate it into the new Haiku website now in development. We hope that Karl is still willing to work together with us so that we can continue and extend his legacy.

Needless to say, we also want to thank the many Haiku fans who put their faith in the project by making generous donations to HaikuBounties.