20 Reasons
Michael Phipps has a long list of reasons, but I don't find any of them very convincing. On the whole Haiku still looks irrelevant.
Distribution - Be got this one right and neither Linux nor Windows have. Build all of the libraries that developers need into the OS and update them with an ultra-high quality build every year or two. No one likes to reload their OS and no one likes .dll or .so misery.
It's hard to say how Haiku could get this more wrong than BeOS. Hardly any useful stuff included in the OS, and what is available comes in several flavours which are silently incompatible. Every popular system today does better, and they're not resting on their laurels.
BFS - It's journaled, it's as big as anyone will ever need, it has live queries and attributes, it is built for fast throughput at the expense of slower deletes/creates. No checkdisk ever.
Without data journalling BeFS lacks the integrity required for some business critical data. Maybe Michael's filesystem is as big as he'll ever need, but if your BeFS isn't as big as you need you won't be resizing it on the fly, and Haiku doesn't do logical volume management either. The lack of integrity and repair tools is hardly a plus point unless your objective is to lose data.
Kits - Everyone building a new language (with the exception of .Net languages) needs to start from scratch on both Windows and Linux - the OS provides you with very little for dozens of common functions (i.e. loading a bitmapped image). We have very powerful kits and more to come.
Rebadging a few features as "Kits" does little to disguise the lack of functionality in BeOS or Haiku. Binding a new language to libraries with a C API in Windows or Linux is far easier than trying to use the Haiku kits in a similar way, even ignoring the horrible C++ symbol mangling.
MIT license - I know that licensing is always a touchy subject, but even the most ardent GPL devotees have to admit that it is easier to talk to potential embedding situations with a BSD license. Certainly an advantage over Windows.
This might make sense if Haiku distributed nothing but MIT licensed code developed by Haiku Inc and its volunteers. Unfortunately any potential "embedding situations" have to hire someone to untangle which bits are owned by who and covered by which licenses. It would probably be easier to buy from an established embedded Linux vendor, maybe even just to pay for Microsoft's embedded licenses.
Fast Boot/Shutdown - With energy concerns growing, the age-old practice of leaving your machine on (to reduce thermal stress and prolong the life of the machine) is becoming something that people question more and more. Fast booting will allow people to use their machines only when they need them in a more comfortable way.
Of course, when you turn off your machine you lose all your work. Other systems have standby and hibernate modes that conserve power or turn it off altogether without losing your open documents, half-written emails and progress at Freecell. Haiku doesn't.
C++ - Given a choice between C, C#, Objective C or C++, I believe that the vast majority of developers would choose C++ for native application development. I know that I would.
It's only to be expected that Michael is behind his own project. Doesn't make any more relevant than anyone else's pet projects.
Replicants - People are starting to see the value of replicants with Widgets and a dozen other cute names. We have had them for almost a decade. We need to make much better use of them.
This feature has been around since the 1980s under a variety of names. Every modern GUI system has it. Be's implementation (and thus Haiku's) isn't especially good, but it's workable. Not much relevance here.
Unity of Direction - No one serious about the Haiku community will go out and write their own windowing environment. They will work from the inside on app_server. Likewise the Media Kit, kernel, etc.
Not so much a reason as a tautology. When people leave or fork the code, Michael can say they aren't serious about the Haiku community. If they stay they're "working from the inside". It's hard to imagine a project so dysfunctional that it couldn't make this argument and harder to imagine why anyone would bother.
Simplicity - Every programming project that is not brutally trimmed (and, honestly, very few are) grow hoary with age. Functions are obsoleted but not removed, reasons for performing a particular action become irrelevant, hardware is discontinued but the code doesn't change. Haiku, even though it is using the BeOS API, is a fresh start.
4.5 years ago Haiku was a fresh start. Tomorrow someone will make a fresh start on something else. That doesn't make either project relevant.
Multi-Threading - Designed with and for multi-threading from the ground up, Haiku will make better use of the dual, quad (and more!) core chips that are the future. It makes our windowing feel snappier and more responsive.
Everybody has multi-threading, although without Be's involuntary "pervasive multi-threading" that made it such a nightmare to develop for. In regards to multi-processor and especially today's non-uniform memory designs, Haiku is a mere toy. It has almost a decade of basic work to catch up on.
Focus - Everyone else out there is determined to be in as many "markets" as possible - much like the old story about the whole world looking like a nail when you hold a hammer. When doing anything in life, there are tradeoffs; software is no exception. The same tradeoffs that make an OS good for the desktop make it less than ideal for a server. With a solid focus on the desktop, we will exceed what others are doing on the desktop because they are doing a dozen things.
Didn't Michael mention embedding a few paragraphs ago? How is that an example of "focus on the desktop"? Software is an exception to a lot of rules, and this is one of them. Ideas percolate from tiny embedded devices and from big iron, systems with a broader horizon benefit, staying ahead of the game.
Small Footprint - While machines are getting faster, with more memory and more hard drive space, Haiku is staying small and efficient. That means savings to users who won't need to buy the newest equipment to run the OS. It also makes us more fit for endeavors like the $100 laptop.
We haven't seen any evidence that Haiku is "efficient" and small can mean lacking in features, rather than actually doing the same things in less space.
Files are Power - Our e-mail and people files are a concept that I don't see on other operating systems. The power of MIME-typing and standardization give us the power to create a desktop that has more interoperability and flexibility than any other. It is trivial to switch between mail applications or contact management applications on Haiku.
The email-as-file is so old I couldn't even find an origin for it. The most popular example still in use is called Maildir. It's trivial to switch... so long as all your applications store the same things in the same kinds of files and in the same way. Which makes Haiku no better or worse than any other OS.
Add-Ons - Rather than making monolithic libraries, we build frameworks and add-ons. The Translation and Media Kits are great examples of how this can make the operating system extensible between releases in easily understood and maintained ways.
The same facilities exist on every other platform, often put to much better use than in BeOS, it remains to be seen whether Haiku can catch up.
"Do The Right Thing" - We have a focus on the user experience that others lack. Rather than dozens of confusing options hidden behind wizards, we strive to make the software do the right thing: go the extra mile and figure out what can/should be done, choose the best setting by default, etc.
Every UI design group has been claiming to do this since at least the 1990s, probably earlier. Haiku is no more relevant on this front than OS/2.
Relocatability - You can take the Haiku installed hard drive out of one PC, put it into another, and it will "just work" (assuming that we have the drivers). Backups, likewise, can be done just by copying files. No system files that can't be copied, no ghosts required.
The same "relocatability" is present in other systems. Haiku may avoid "system files that can't be copied" but it's foolish to imagine that this alone does away with the need for Ghost or similar image software. You need robust, configurable, automated installation for anything beyond SOHO.
API Stability - Our R1 will be binary compatible with R5. That means that applications from the late nineties will work on a brand new operating system. That is the sort of environment where people can feel confident in investing in software; they know that they will be able to run it for years to come. It is also the sort of environment where driver developers can feel confident knowing that they can develop a driver once and have it work for years.
With the exception of Apple (who've changed OS fundamentals and CPU architectures in that time) everyone else can run applications from the late 1990s on their brand new system. Of course they can also run much newer software with features invented this century.
Scripting - Every control in Haiku is fully scriptable. Every app, via those controls, is fully scriptable. Many apps have their own scriptability beyond the built-in scripting. BeHappy is a great example. While there is no "official" Haiku scripting language, it is fairly easy to add sending and receiving of BMessages to most scripting languages, making any language able to script Haiku apps.
This is true on other popular systems as well. Of course, when there's a wealth of really good application software, and particularly when its available as source code for your own use, people spend less time trying to kludge things with scripting.
"Console vs. GUI"-Agnostic - We provide the best of both. Some people like command lines. Some people fear them. Some people use both. We let the user make that choice.
Ignoring for a moment the fact that BeOS applications can hardly be said to be "the best" of GUI software, this is essentially true of all the popular systems, with the possible exception of Windows (great CLI tools for Win32 are widely available but they're not included in the box)
Community - I have had the opportunity to meet many, many people in the Haiku community. They are, without exception, the nicest, most helpful, kindest, most friendly group of people I have ever met. Even the ones on BeDoper.
On the whole Haiku fans seem like typical "alternative computing" types. People have written equivalent things about Windows users, librarians, Nigerians, and many other groups. It's pretty irrelevant. Most people are nice, if you're nice to them.
Comments
20 Reasons
What is this crap? All flamebait...
I got through the second "argument" about BFS and stopped reading...
You want the tools? - write them! Nobody says they WON'T exist, theyr'e just not really needed most of the time... jeez.
Scanning over the rest of the rebuttals - it appears that there is very little understanding of "how things work" in this posting... Just someone who wants to analyze and complain about EVERYTHING.
20 Reasons
I got worried by his nickname, but I've resisted the temptation to stop reading him.
Clearly, I should have NOT.
:roll:
20 Reasons
Sounds like the BNX developer.. :twisted:
20 Reasons
I think he's just being honest and giving us his opinion on things. Problem is, we never asked for his opinion. :P
Seriously though, he doesn't make any convincing arguments here... sort of missing the forest for all the trees I suspect.
20 Reasons
I wonder if you aren't right.
Just reading the posting - let's try to get the train of thought
"I don't believe in the project so I'll go through the trouble of registering and post lengthy comments on the site"
Just like the interview with Sven Jorg, what is the motivation here??
Maybe this person is trying to draw support away from this project to another one - BNX?
20 Reasons
Eh, I wouldn't go so far as to make any allegations about the BNX developers and their attitude about Haiku...
Although, I'm really starting to get the impression that people were DEFINITELY rubbed the wrong way by Sven's responses in the interview. Interesting...
20 Reasons
Even if it is BNX, as soon as they manage to draw away Haiku devs (maybe in a blue moon... or three) it will be to the detriment of their own project, since they plan on using Haiku kits.
You don't like Haiku, point haiku-os.org to 127.0.0.1 and be done with it. All of us here believe in the project for different reasons and no amount of spin from anyone is going to change that.
20 Reasons
Yeah, but you do have to wonder who would go through that much trouble just because they don't like the project. I can think of some one (not a BNX developer) who might have because he lives in a boxed in world (his own perspective), but he would have mentioned Apple a lot more than that.
I wouldn't say I was rubbed the wrong way by Sven's "responses" at osnews. In fact some of them could be seen as the truth. However his solution comes from a limited point of view with absolutely no thought of other views.
One of the main reasons I believe Haiku can be successful is that it currently doesn't follow this path. It is being built collabaratively by people who have different perspectives and experiences. They tend not to let themselves get boxed in by one particular view.
20 Reasons
I am kind of violating my own philosophy by posting this, but I feel that it should be the philosophy of any endeavor (especially businesses, which haiku is in some ways) should be to persue its own mission regardless of the opinions of others. So, in response to the first post in this thread:
NoHaikuForMe,
Thank you for taking the time to post your opinions about The Haiku Project. The community makes a sincere and honest effort to ensure the most positive experience for users, developers, and enthusiasts ââ¬â but not all people's tastes are the same. The direction of the project is determined by those who contribute to it. The contributors bring to the project their opinions and methodologies, and the community will chooses how/where to implement those contributions. To create negative sentiment, especially when opinionated and unsubstantiated, with no other positive contributions has no good effect towards change or difference. If you remain dissatisfied with the project, I urge you to constructively contribute code or other material.
Regards,
ar1000
Re: 20 Reasons
So...Exactly what do you recommend, then?
Re: 20 Reasons
That's a very vague question.
I can't offer you advice on making Haiku relevant, if it were so easy to start from nothing and make a difference everyone would be doing it.
I can tell you that there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy doing something irrelevant. Most people who play baseball aren't Babe Ruth, they wouldn't even make the farm team, but they still have fun doing it.
If you meant a recommendation about an OS to actually use to get something done or write some software, you haven't provided enough information. Explain what you need to do and maybe I or someone else can help.
Computers are irrelevant
well let's just expand arguments here a bit.
Computers are irrelevant. Life is about making love, so all OSes are irrelevant and so are computers.
This type of crappy attitude hits every project all the time. I never thought Haiku was aiming for world dominance, just for a little place where it can nourish at it's own pace. Seems to be the idea of the community (although I can hardly talk for all here). So if you don't like it, take a hike, if you do like, stay around and have a good time.
Re: 20 Reasons
It sounds like you're comparing Haiku's relevance to how it compares with other OSes with the exact same intent.... in other words - you're comparing all baseball players to Babe Ruth in order to determine relevance.
Keep in mind Haiku is only trying to follow in the footsteps of BeOS (for now) - it is not trying to accomplish all the same things that Windows, OSX, and Linux accomplish.
I assume that you use the same arguments to render BeOS irrelevant. In this case, you are truly not opening your eyes to the actual architecture of the system vs. that of "competitors". Haiku (and BeOS) is probably more relevant to "geeks" that care about the underlying design rather than what they can accomplish.
You really SHOULD eat your words someday if technologies developed by Haiku developers end up in other products that you use on a daily basis. Unfortunately you may never know since the code is licensed under the MIT/BSD license and freely usable without any major restrictions by all that desire. That is where the relevance really exists in my opinion.
As for starting from nothing and making a difference -- what planet are you from? People do this every day. It's called innovation.
I was gonna end my message at that, but I decided to rant a bit further...
Ask the Zeta team how relevant Haiku is - ask the Robert S. of SkyOS how relevant Haiku is - ask the BNX guys how relevant Haiku is... All of them rely on Haiku for SOMETHING - it is improving THEIR projects - therefore it is very relevant to them.
Now, going back to BeOS - maybe you think BeOS is irrelevant because it's "dead" - but let me remind you that it is FAR more likely that BeOS is dead as a result of "bad business" than it is because it's bad technology. I believe BeOS has been highly regarded as one of the most technically advanced desktop-oriented OSes to have graced the OS market in a long time. Sure, OSX is nice looking, stable, and incorporates many of the same ideas - but is the underlying architecture really any more advanced than today's run-of-the-mill BSD or Linux variants? I think it just has a nice candy coating and super-great marketing... but hey, that's me. I consider OSX to be irrelevant.
Re: 20 Reasons
But you find it "easy" to complain and put down other people's views? What are you trying to accomplish? Sounds like you are trying to justify your own brand of mentality. You will not accomplish it with anybody here.
A lot of people play baseball as a form of socializing and getting exercise.
That is hardly irrelevant. There is an emotional element there that you obviously fail to comprehend from your limited view point.
Correction, you didn't provide enough information in your original post, but obviously you don't understand that.
By failing to comprehend what is stated? by complaining? The reality is most of the people here understand the potential of Haiku. However, I can easily understand why a person with limited perspective wouldn't.
Re: 20 Reasons
Since you are the one to usher in the negativity, it is your responsibility to 'explain what to do' and perhaps help ââ¬â others are already contributing (via code or otherwise) As of yet, you haven't been very constructive there would have been more appropriate ways to initiate conversation regarding change or evolution of Haiku. Frankly, its relevance is not yours, or mine to determine. History determines relevance.
Re: 20 Reasons
You pretend to know what is (and isn't) relevant, yet "lack the necessary information" required to make a recommendation? Sorry duder, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Haiku is relevant
Perhaps you should ponder the fact that there are 6 projects to recreate BeOS: Haiku, Zeta, BlueEyedOS, BNX, Gnube, and Cosmoe. Perhaps BeOS and therefore Haiku are in fact relevant? Perhaps it has some features that no other operating system in BeOS's time or now have?
BeOS has a system, called the Media Kit, through which any program can transparently load and save any media file. Windows has the limited DirectShow filters system so that any program can load any media format supported by Windows, but it costs money to develop for, and a program needs to have different code to save AVI files than to save MPEG files. Linux, Unix, and OSX do not have a similar system.
BeOS also has the Translation Kit, which allows any program to load and open any picture or document transparently. No other operating system has that either.
The simple idea that all of a person's contacts should exist as a file, and thus create a system-wide address book, also seems to be lacking in the major OS distrobutions as well.
Perhaps there's a reason that BeOS has been copied so many times?
Re: Computers are irrelevant
What about the cases where people meet and communicate with their love partner by using their computer??
There are always people who like to complain. It's their goofy idea of contributing. It's the fallacy that by merely exercising freedom of speech they are actually accomplishing something.
Didn't you get the memo?? Haiku as a WMD.
It's an "open"-source project for "open"-minded people.
Re: Computers are irrelevant
Yes I got the memo, and I understand the policy of the organisation...
Re: 20 Reasons
Michael's editorial makes no sense in that context.
If Haiku actually had a great underlying design it would be relevant, not because Haiku would be a success, but because it might influence future systems. But it doesn't. It's a clone of BeOS, a system that refused to learn from other people's mistakes.
People have been telling me that I'll eat my words for a long time. I notice that none of the people who said similar things about the importance of Cosmoe, or BeFree are here to speak up...
Technologies is a very vague word here. Borrowing fragments of driver code to initialise some rare hardware? Using design documents to implement a compatibility mode so that BeOS refugees to e.g. OS X can run their own programs until they find a suitable replacement? I don't expect to see any great innovations in Haiku, and I certainly haven't so far, but if they happen then yes, I'd expect someone to rescue them and use them elsewhere.
When it comes to big strategic stuff, misinformed fans of any particular platform are always complaining that other people ripped them off. Every time PNG is mentioned on Slashdot, some Amigans show up to say that the Amiga invented tagged file formats and PNG is really IFF. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight, there were hoards of Believers telling anyone who'd listen that BeOS did it first.
This seems to be a common misconception, which I suppose means that Be's small scale marketing worked very well. BeOS R3 had a lot of technical features that weren't in the popular systems of the same period (though few of them were actually new to operating systems in general). By the release of BeOS R5 that gap had narrowed, and in 2001 there was hardly anything you could point to in BeOS that wasn't being done better elsewhere.
But in the context we're discussing it isn't,
Re: Haiku is relevant
Gnube is so insubstantial that no-one's even been able to tell me who actually works on it in the months (years maybe) since it was added to BeUnited's list of projects. BlueEyedOS and Cosmoe are long abandoned, as are Sequel, FreeBe and others you didn't mention. BNX has an OS News interview and very little else. So that leaves Haiku and Zeta.
There are three extant projects to recreate the Amiga OS, at least two to recreate Windows, and so on for DOS, CP/M, the Atari OS, etc. etc.
Microsoft gives away or heavily discounts (e.g. 3 years membership for $100) more MSDN memberships, SDKs and other bits for independent developers than Be Inc ever sold copies of BeOS. I can think of at least two hobby projects that release Windows codecs for their video compression.
Every platform you mentioned has codec APIs (QuickTime, GStreamer etc.), and indeed on x86 can use the older Microsoft APIs as well as their native API. The fact that radically different codecs may require special handling in some APIs is an example of the "law of leaky abstractions" rather than of any particular deficiency in the APIs.
BeOS didn't do anything particularly novel in this space. Be Inc. promised some things that hadn't been done before, particularly in their conference with AV developers, but they didn't deliver. Since then other platforms have.
Every desktop system we're discussing has this feature. It's an obvious application of dynamic shared objects, but it existed in a crude form in the 1980s before DSOs existed. It's even in AmigaOS (and, even in AmigaOS forums there are users running around claiming that it's a unique feature and other people should sell their Athlon64s and buy an A1200). Unfortunately the law of leaky abstractions bites again, such features work fairly well for lossless image compression, not so well for things like JPEG and altogether pretty badly for spreadsheets, 3D models and other rich documents.
There's a system wide address book on this machine without the need for dozens of tiny files and (performance draining) filesystem level indices. The VOIP software shares its contact database with the email software and the IM software and they all also offer the option of LDAP for corporate use.
As illustrated at the start of my reply, practically any system you can think of that ever had more than a few thousand users has been cloned.
Re: 20 Reasons
All I did was respond to Michael's editorial. Perhaps you should ask Michael to "explain what to do" or better, make up your own minds.
20 Reasons
What's the point of discussing with someone who has a blurred idea about the true motives behind his actions and opinions...his absurd devoting of time and energy to a subject he considers irrelevant is sufficient proof to me and the written result is in fact the -as always pretty boring- 'food for psychologists'.
20 Reasons
NoHaikuForMe, can you answer the following question: if you think that Haiku is irrelevant, why do you post here?
20 Reasons
Michael's "20 Reasons" editorial deserved a rebuttal, and no-one else had written one. This seems to be the most appropriate venue for a public response to Michael's newsletter editorials.
Re: 20 Reasons
It's clear you don't know what you're talking about. So you are saying that the underlying design is inferior to that of the competition? LOL, like windows? Like linux which uses ancient technology (X) to have some sort of very slow eye-candy gui?
And BeOS is a system that refused to learn from other people's mistakes? Maybe you should try to explain this, since quite the opposite is true. BeOS was a completely new design, where design faults from other systems were avoided.
Maybe you could name a few design-flaws in beos, so the Haiku devs can take them in to account for R2.
Did you ever use BeOS anyway? It sure looks like you didn't!
20 Reasons
So I have to wonder who is being "hurt" by Michael's 20 reasons that made it so imperative you post this diatribe (which is incorrect in many places.) Constructive criticism is useful, but this is anything but constructive. Therefore I am going to guess at your motivation:
Anyhow, it doesn't really matter, because as they say, you'll attract more flies with honey than with vinegar. So don't expect anyone here to respect your opinions or take you seriously if you post in such a negative, non-constructive way.
If on the other hand you have suggestions for the project that might improve things then please suggest them.
Eugenia?
For some reason - I get the distinct impression that NoHaikuForMe sounds like Eugenia from OSNews...
20 Reasons
If you're target audience were Michael and the developers that support him - you're better off posting to the mailing list.
Re: 20 Reasons
Markedly inferior. Some parts are merely inadequate like networking, or the windowing system while others are missing altogether, like i18n and privilege separation. If you look elsewhere on this forum you'll find someone struggling to replicate in Haiku/ BeOS a simple feature of X, and failing. The feature is simple in X because it provides mechanism, not policy, while BeOS is confused, and mixes the two.
When work began on BeOS there had been several quite successful windowing systems. Many lessons had been learned about the windowing server, the widget toolkits, and so on. Be ignored nearly all of them, eventually producing a system that expected programmers to manually calculate the size of widgets, and obliged them to either deal with complex concurrency problems throughout their application or make some GUI elements modal, frustrating the user. It wasn't network transparent, didn't separate mechanism from policy and made porting the huge range of existing GUI applications on other platforms needlessly difficult.
Re: Eugenia?
I had the same thought actually...
20 Reasons
NoHaikuForMe, some of your arguments are interesting. I don't have the history under my belt to know if what you're saying is the truth. But THAT, as well as everything you've said thus far, is irrelevant because:
You are trying to convince people who--for whatever reasons, relevant or not--LOVED the BeOS experience, and this is why you won't convince one of us that it's irrelevant; you cannot change our minds that we loved the BeOS experience.
So maybe BeOS and Haiku are irrelevant, who knows? But THAT, sir, is irrelevant. We aren't recreating BeOS because we think it's relevant; we're recreating BeOS because we loved using it.
Others have asked you for a recommendation on what to use instead. You didn't give us any answers, but I doubt it would've mattered if you had; most of us are aware of the various other OSes out there, but BeOS is still at the top of our list.
20 Reasons
NoHaikuForMe, gotta thank you for being fairly civil and having put forward coherent arguments. We'll get increasing amounts of criticism in the future and it's good to see that not everyone will act like an annoying 13 yr old.
It's not really worth going over the few technical flaws in your complaints or areas I disagree, we'll just end up arguing in circles; Rather it's great to see areas where we need to improve. Food for the (largely silent these days) glass elevator project.
20 Reasons
I sort of came to the same conclusion. At first, the arguments/rebuttals appeared to be baseless... but as discussion went on, it became a bit clearer that NoHaikuForMe actually DID have some background on the subject matter. There was a point where I realized I was arguing about something different (not the relevance of the "20 reasons" post by Michael - but rather the relevance of Haiku's efforts in general) and decided to simply shut up.
I still think the original post was formatted as flamebait - and I would have preferred if each point was debated as separate threads making it easier for those doing who cared about each to focus on the ones they believed were worth debating. There are definitely some points in Michael's 20 reasons that don't mean anything to me.
20 Reasons
I think everyone has their own reasons for being associated with this project, and it is doubtful that Michael's 20 would be appropriate for everyone. Each of us will make our own relevance.
There are probably valid criticisms in the original post, but in my opinion it was worded in such a way as to say "no matter what you think or the work you do on it, Haiku is a worthless project and a big waste of time." Frankly that is insulting to the people who have worked on it, and to those who choose to associate with it. There were infinitely more tactful ways to make the point the OP was trying to make. Not that people need to treat the Haiku community with kid gloves, but it makes sense that if you want your message to get across to your audience, it helps not to insult them.
20 Reasons
[not done yet, lol]
20 Reasons
Hi,
Michael Phipps's points aren't very interesting from my point of view, they seem way too subjective.
What maybe could be a good general idea - if you want - would be regular votings about things-which-need-attention from a user's perspective.
I for instance care much more for an OS that can run ruby/python than an OS that has 3D Games support. (This is just to name one comparison ... :) )
20 Reasons
Well I agree with you on that, but frankly supporting Ruby or Python will be extremely easy, as they are already ported to BeOS and would probably only require minor changes to work on Haiku. In fact the Haiku port would probably be "cleaner" than the original BeOS port because Haiku will be more POSIX-compliant.
But I know that was just an example and again I do see your point. It makes some sense that there should be a somewhat democratic discussion on where things should be focused. In the end though, the developers will work on whatever they want, because after all, they are volunteers. Unless Haiku can hire people again. But still I doubt even hired developers would be forced to work on something they didn't want to.