Haikuware

Both bebits and haikuware are down for more than a week.

Really, he's poring over the logs? Anything in particular that led you to your speculation?

Regards,
Humdinger

For my part I can't say I blame IRC, but more generally it's obvious that Karl has been disgruntled for many years now. Haiku is often handled as the private tree house club of a handful of people, and for whatever reason Karl isn't invited. He was unwelcome back in the Michael Phipps days and the same is true now. It's entirely possible that he finally got the message and took his ball home.

Karl apparently told Alexander that he wanted to either pay out the Gallium3D bounty in the next six months or hand it over to Haiku Inc. That bounty has been stalled for over three years, but the site advertising it has only gone away in the past week or so.

Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about Haiku politics. Haikuware and BeBits were both welcome resources for BeOS and Haiku enthusiasts, and it is a shame that both may be gone because of BS.

Decisions for the Haiku project are made by the people with commit rights. Anyone's proposal is discussed and if it gains traction with some of the committers, and the majority (formally or informally determined) approves, it can be implemented. I can't remember Karl proposing anything besides not doing package management (which may be after it was implemented...). The committers didn't agree with him.
His other endeavour has been how to spend donations to Haiku Inc. There have been long discussion, and the majority of Haiku Inc. didn't agree with him to do bounties rather than contract work.
Looks to me like Karl can't accept people disagreeing with him. If you can't convince people of something, try as you might, it's not prove that everyone's just against you. It might just be that you're wrong.

It's just sad that he tries to cause maximum damage to the Haiku users by silently removing the software sites he created or bought.

Regards,
Humdinger

It's nice to see people pledging their undying love for Haikuware, but where have you been lately? The site has been deserted for the last several months. Maybe a new app once a month, if we're lucky. It is not just up to Karl to keep the site up, it's also up to us, the community, to keep it alive by feeding it with new items of binary delight. Or if you can't do that, at least to keep the forums alive with comments. Don't lay it all on Karl, it's our responsibility too.

And having said that, I must admit I've put my own development activities on hold until we get a stable beta. The latest nightlies have just been too unstable. No big loss, you may say, your apps are rubbish. Fair enough, but at least I was writing them. 2 1/2 years between releases is just not good enough. If they can't give us a beta, at least we need an alpha 5 to tell the world that the project is still alive.

But it's part of the entire culture that says that Haiku was never meant to be a viable product, just a plaything for system devs. If you don't believe me go read the devs mailing list archives, there are voices there openly saying there will never be a R2, just an ongoing learning experience for the devs themselves, and that R1 maintenance is doubtful.

Sorry, I'm drifting off the topic. No, actually I'm not. This is not about Karl's personal grievances. It is about the project's entire attitude towards its wider community (the little of it that's left). The biggest news in the haiku world in the last YEAR has been that Tunetracker has brought out its own distro. After many years of NO activity on the PR mailing list, Ritchie is now trying to advance the project all by himself.

It looks like I am the only one who thinks that is insane. This is the 21st century. You do not survive by endless tinkering. You survive by creating buzz, excitement, by constantly giving people something to talk about.

But let me shut up. There's no point, hardly any devs read these forums anyway.

I'm quite a bit surprised by this, being myself a dev and having personally commited to doing the beta1 and R1 maintenance (and reading the forums).

Yes, Haiku is made by people working mostly on their free time, and some of them have no interest in doing a release. Is that a problem? I don't think so, these people are doing quite good work in preparing the features for R2 and beyond. Some are also not interested in the PR stuff. Is that a problem? I think not, anyone is free to join the project and start helping with that, as Richie Nyhus and Andrew Hudson did recently. And yes, we do need a lot more people in the PR team, because the people writing code won't take care of that work.

You see a problem of the attitude of the projects toward the community. The Haiku project is, above anything, about writing the code for the OS. I think it delivers on that side, and the level of donations directed to Haiku, inc. in the previous year shows that at least part of the community is happy with that. I think there is a problem of the attitude of (part of) the community towards the project. It's easy to complain that things are not done right, that they could be improved (and it's even easier to do so, when you are right about it). But, anyone is free to step up and join the project and start helping (note: I'm talking about the project here, let's leave the non-profit org out of the discussion for now - until the next paragraph at least). I think you did so, by writing some apps and contributing to the forums (here or at haikuware). Maybe you can help create more buzz too. Join the PR team, help propagating the news and doing some outreach. No need to even know how to write code for that. About Haiku, inc: the late events clearly shows that yes, there is a problem in how it is working. There is an ongoing complaint that the decisions are made in "secret" and there is some truth to this. There are some good reasons for this (for example, Haiku, inc is sometimes dealing with very personal issues of the developers they have hired, and it is nice that not all of the discussions are disclosed). But most of the time they sure could do things more openly. The Inc is in "life support" mode right now anyway. Most of the board members have no time to run it anymore. This means it may be a good time to setup a new team, and it looks like a lot of people around here have ideas about what could be done. Maybe you should all at least try to apply to be a new board member and help draft the new status there (if that fails, at least you will have one more reason to complain about Haiku, Inc). If they don't accept you, maybe you can start a new non-profit and fork the sourcecode. Is the "Haiku" name that important, after all? If that's all there is to it, you don't need the people writing the code, anyway, so just find another cool name for your project and make it a success! I'm looking forward to it. Maybe some fragmentation and diversity is welcome?

I've probably out-stayed my welcome in this particular conversation already, but if I might add one last thing:

Reforming Haiku Inc. is not the only possible way forward. As the existing members know running a non-profit is a burden and that burden is not eliminated but only parcelled out differently by reform. Haiku's contributors and/or the existing non-profit members could look at Free Software umbrella organisations that hold non-profit status and do administration on behalf of several projects. Examples include the Apache Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Conservacy, and Software in the Public Interest. One of those (or there are doubtless others to consider) might be willing to embrace the Haiku project, taking over the trademarks, etc. and allowing the existing non-profit to be wound down.

So, this complaint that we break compatibility with nogood reasons and don't care about the complaints are not true. But the people complaining must take the small effort needed to open a bug report. Otherwise nothing will happen. I think this is a fair and simple rule?

So, we decided on a compromise which is to stay compatible with BeOS, only. This means there is a fixed target and it makes things a lot easier.

I will repeat myself once again, as I already did many times. "I tested random software and it did not work" does NOT help to fix the problem in any way. You ask why we don't provide the BeOS compatibility package by default. The reason is that this way the default system is "clean" of the legacy stuff. It makes sure people learn about the correct way to do things (using find_directory instead of hardcoding paths, etc). If we had the package installed, people would still be hardcoding /beos/apps/whatever into their apps, and the day we decide to remove it, we would face the problem again. Or, we would decide to have our system folder called "beos", a trademark infringement, just so old apps can run.

After all those years, very few people took the time to open specific bug reports about the software that is broken and that they still want to use. I did more than my share of fixing issues on my own (just yesterday I uploaded packages for the BeOS port of the VLC media player to HaikuDepot). I still have free time to work on such things, and my TODO list is shrinking. Yet, I don't see much reports about broken software happening. To me it means that the few apps that were broken are not useful to anyone, or at least not enough that they are bothered to open a bug report. Seriously, how hard is it to attach a debug report to a ticket? You don't want to spend these 5 minutes, and we should be working to fix the problems? Note that I don't pretend that the issues don't exist, only that in the software I use, I either didn't see problems, or I already fixed them. But I don't use (or even know) all of the BeOS software.

All Haiku Friends,

I did a quick search and Haikuware (as well as BeBits) has a history of going off-line - about every 2-3 years or so.

It is more likely that the fees for hosting the site were not renewed in time instead of its owner of BeBits/Haikuware being unhappy with the every slow progress of Haiku towards Alpha.

Given that Haiku (and its predecessor BeOS) have a vastly different architecture than Linux, it is not that surprising that the learning curve (and development progress) is slower than any of the Linux distributions. In any event, it is still much faster than that of the much lamented Hurd.

Hi Pulkomandy,

Your contributions to Haiku bug fixes are legendary, so thank you. Also thank you for explaining the reasons for the decisions regarding development choices that impacted compatibility. As the project has gone on for a long time it really helps to re-discuss the decisions.

I think the development decisions were made with good intent. I think if we had known how long development would stay in Alpha stage, and how difficult it would be to get good apps running on Haiku. we may have chosen a slightly different path.

I still believe Haiku would have benefited from more pro-active interaction with app developers and app testers. I still think that Haiku development as a whole should be more oriented towards applications. More applications, better applications will bring more users, and more developers.

We also have dedicated haiku-3rdparty mailing list and IRC channels, which are remarkably quiet, and mostly populated by haiku developers ready to answer questions. Where are the promised app developers after all the efforts setting this up?

Haiku is generally a lot more friendly to developers than many other projects. Getting commit access and becoming a member of the project is very easy (if you think you should after years of submitting patches, we probably forgot about you - please ask!).

ok https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/PackageManagement/BuildingPackages
but still don't know how to upload!

I like Haiku Depot, it is an important thing to have a good native Package Manager.

Nevertheless I miss Haikuware, it was also a good plattform to contribute to the hole Haiku project.
I am not a good dev, but to port some SDL games is not so hard (I did it years ago for BeOS/Zeta), and I thought to do it again, but noticed haikuware is offline...

thanks

LOL - Herr Humdinger is exactly correct :-)

http://bb.haikuports.org/haikuports/wiki/HaikuPorterForPM

We get different results in different projects with this, ranging from big interest for the OS to plain and simple rejecting the patches. And various levels of indifference in the middle. But, I doubt it is up to the OS developers to do this. Don't they have more than enough work to do already? And why would they do better at this than other Haiku enthusiasts? They will be there, of course, to answer any technical questions. But the outreach shouldn't be in their hands, it is a task other people can take care of.

Usually, this would mean people would stay outside the "project". But we have made exceptions to this rule: some people got commit access and project membership without writing patches. While they won't use much of the commit access, they do get a vote in important decisions made by the project. I see no problem in doing that for evangelists, if they do a good work. But I don't know if there is a strong need for that, either.

but it looks like that some people are not happy, how things are going on
http://haikuossucks.blogspot.co.at/2015/03/the-forum-post-they-didn-want...

Time to dust off BeShare and start sharing all those downloaded files.

As BeShare in haikudepot is broken at the moment, I have shared a version packaged by AGMS:

http://fatelk.com/beshare-2.28-1-x86_gcc2.hpkg

This one is not broken and works well.

It shoud be obviously apparent that we are not going to get Haikuware or BeBits back, and why. We have lost a valuable resource.

This page is now showing a form where you can register your interest for Senryu, a fork of Haiku.
The idea of Senryu is interesting and may change things in a good way.

It's indeed a pity BeBits and Haikuware are down now. They were good resources for software. I'm lurking around here since 10 years now, was, as many other users here, interested in using and supporting Haiku as alternative operating system.

And I can really understand the reasons why a lot of users and even developers separate from the development of Haiku.

The makers of Haiku are really hard-working, but they aren't good product and project managers and are not able to communicate their aims and reasons in a transparent way. All we know is they don't want others to make decisions. Under the guise of the Haiku cooperation. Reading the mailing list reveals these deficiences.

I'm sorry, but this is a dead end. Stop being working in this idealistic and perfectionistic way, try to make project management more user-driven and agile and stop to build everything on your own. Stop to reinvent the wheels (e.g. package manager), because you never will be able to make it better than others who developed man-years on such stuff.

I am happy to refresh your memory

[haiku-development] Re: Beta1 and R1 release plan
From: Axel Dörfler 
To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:57:32 +0100
while the plan is very developer friendly, it's also very short-sighted IMO: 
there is no upgrade path from R1 to something beyond. There is no plan as to what R2
is beyond a playfield for developers. Those two combined sound to me like R1 will 
be the last (usable) release for years to come.

Now Herr Dörfler is arguing against this, it should be noted. But it shows that the problem really does exist, and it is not merely a problem for one or two disgruntled users.

Senryu was a good idea before HaikuDepot. It wasn't meant to fork Haiku code as it was to provide a rich version of Haiku that had apps, wallpaper, media, screensaver, some customizations,etc. It was meant to provide a much better 'out of the box' experience than just the plain, skinny, Haiku release.

But HaikuDepot makes it much easier to download apps in short order. If and when HaikuDepot is heavily populated with apps, games, productivity software, wallpaper, screen savers, media, etc, there will actually be less demand for Haikuware software.

As someone who spent a lot of time going through haikuware looking for useful, interesting, and runnable software, I can say that 95% of the items on Haikuware were not useful, not interesting, and/or not runnable. However, that last 5% made up most of the apps that are runnable on Haiku. What we really lost out on was a lot of games that still needed porting to HaikuDepot.

It doesn't really show me much all, out of context as it is, but anyway I think it's an error to go over developer's discussions of far-distant plans with a magnifying glass like that, and take what you see so seriously. While I'm optimistic that we will reach R1, even this is a kind of race against entropy and whatever other destructive forces. Then there will be time to wrangle over what to do next.

Wouldnt it be a good sign to give this distro / fork a news entry on the main Site?
I think this could be a good "sign" form our side to Karl ;-).
At least i think it would be the last he expect. Because from what i understand he thinks we are / the haiku devs are ignorant.
And i dont think senryu will take away to much devs from haiku mabye even bring back some devs to haiku / senryu?