Kickstarter Haiku campaign

it's a very good idea indeed.

@drcouzelis: put your optimism on.

Let's see what it happens if someone, who has XP in marketing, do a Haiku promotional video for kickstarter.
sure Haiku Inc. could hire a couple of more Devs if enough money is raised.

Even haiku inc still has money, there is no one, who wants to work full-time on haiku. So it seems, the problems is not just one of the money.

Haiku is too broad a subject for kickstarter. However, you could start a kickstarter for a specific piece of Haiku you'd like to have funded and built, similar to bounties. For instance you could make a kickstarter for the Intel HDA driver or for the compositing app server. Ultimately funding is one part of the equation, you need smart, talented, and dedicated developers willing to work on such a project first -- only then could you create a kickstarter.

In other words kickstarter is not a magic bullet.

what do you mean by long-term? 3 years? 5 years?

the last time, i think 1 year was offered to michael, and with the option to enlarge the contract depending on the donations.
I think one should really make a poll somewhere, or simply ask the main haiku developers, under what conditions they would start working for haiku full-time under contract. I have a little suspicion, that even even haiku inc would offer contracts for 3 years or 5 years, most of them would still not accept.

well, haiku inc offered about 2.000 euro a month. That's anything but bad. In normal case even the game developers (except perhpas the leader) don't get more than 2.000 - 3.000 a month.
Most engineers dont get a month more than 2.000-3.000 in normal case.
And you have also the advantage that you dont have in fact a real boss, you can manage your time how you want, you can work wherever you want, and work on stuff that you like. For example you could move to an tropical island, and work from there on haiku.

So, what do you understand under "pay them well enough" ? Where is the limit? (I mean, of course if you offer let's say 1 million euro a month, of course you will find somebody).

so the solution is just, to ask haiku developers, and see under what conditions they would work fulltime for haiku inc.

it makes no sense to start dreaming and speculating, what you be if haiku had more money.
the most straight forward thing would be to go and ask on the mailing list the haiku developers under what conditions they would start working on haiku fulltime.
I think you would be disappointed about the response.

And taking an external developer is a little dangerous, since for example he will not know haiku and learning how it works, could take a lot of time.
Perhaps working on a single component (e.g. graphics drivers) could be done also by an external dev. but i doubt that you will find anybody.
Try to post on article on osnews.com like: Offering 2.000 euro for fulltime dev, for writing code for Haiku, and then see how many people are interested.

Look at the package management. Even haiku inc has enough money to pay for continuing the work on package management, nobody wants to (or has something else to do).
There are a lot of other smaller hobby os's than haiku, which have a lot less money, and they are also dreaming, how much progress they could make if they had the money of haiku inc.

If there is no money, people are inclined to think: yes we dont make much progress because we dont have money to pay for developers. But once you have the money, you have to notice, that just the money is not enough.

I really feel sorry for karl (haikuware.com) , who donated a lot of money (i think all together about 10.000 - 20.000 or even more) and in the end, there is nobody willing to work for it.

but if you took a look at "ouya" you would understand that haiku can not do the same.
First haiku is not ported (and perhaps will not be ported for a long time) to arm. Second we dont have hw-acceleration, and haiku has just a few applications. And haiku at the moment is unfriendly for game development.
it has not much sense to dream with the eyes opened.

Just to clarify: Almost all of the donations up to now have been used for development, see the Funded Development page at Haiku Inc. What's currently in the warchest is just enough to finance the next two contracts that have been proposed for the end of the year. With a bit of luck we'll have a working package manager this time next year, bringing us very close to beta and then R1.

Regards,
Humdinger

The amount listed on the piggy bank is the year-to-date fundraiser. The warchest is larger and could fund additional contracts. :)

Yes like many others it seems, I've also considered this to be an opportunity for Haiku. Also like many others, the problem seems to be coming up with the 'right' project to pitch.

My personal suggestion would be a focus on getting R1 out, so whatever is necessary to get that finalized could be a kickstarter project.

From what I gather the biggie(s) missing for r1 are finishing the package management and perhaps also the layout api? Of course in order to make a kickstarter project out of something like 'help Haiku reach r1 in 2013!' there would have to be a concrete plan on what needs to be done and by whom and what funds are required to make it happen and also a timeplan, the logistics of this is something I personally wouldn't want to attempt.

Anyway like lxstoian suggested, a kickstarter project would hopefully raise awareness even if it's not incredible successful in gathering funds and any exposure of Haiku is very welcome, come on we all know it's great, it's time others realize it aswell :)

One thing that does not bode well for a Haiku kickstarter is what some people in this thread already pointed out, that there are already funds available for contract work but there's still a shortage of interested/eligable developers.

From what I gather the biggie(s) missing for r1 are finishing the package management and perhaps also the layout api?

The parts missing for R1 are a Password Manager for Wifi (last missing piece of Wifi support), and Package Management. Other than that several bugs still need to be fixed.

Open R1 Beta1 Milestone tickets

The Locale kit should also be updated before R1 to have a more robust API, I am a bit nervous about having to maintain binary compatibility with the current Locale Kit API. The Layout APIs however are nearly complete and are not holding up release of R1.

Better driver support, especially for Nvidia cards and Intel HDA audio would also be appreciated but are not holding up release.

Non-programming tasks include finishing up the Haiku Book (BeBook replacement API documentation) and finishing the Haiku User Guide.

Personally, I think that fully supported HaikuBox and completion of beta/R1 of Haiku appear to be a decent Kickstarter goal, at least in my opinion.

Speaking of hardware, I like Zotac ZBOX as potential example of HaikuBox. Apparently they have AMD/NVIDIA/Intel based configurations, so it may be possible to pick one with hardware mostly supported and open specifications of wifi and gfx drivers (e.g. Intel, AMD ones), so the lacking drivers can be written without proprietary code or wrappers (I look at you right now, nVidia). Ideally there should be a small list of 100% compatible modern nettops / netboxes / netbooks or other smaller desktop computers that look good, work fast and represent the idea similar to something like "Small box. Big possibilities". Upcoming package manager must provide the option of constant updates via the web, so the OS, device drivers and applications are always up to date.

Main reason behind the promotional videos of Haiku should be to channel the idea of powerful modern desktop OS with bright future and limitless possibilities, something fresh, new and exciting. The original iconic BeOS video is a good example ("We are trying to become the Linux of audio and video applications" --JLG), but we're talking 2012/2013 here. So it's not just about the multimedia capabilities, but also integration with Web, mutli-core performance and effective management of multiple running apps even on small machines.

writing ebook-reader apps wouldn't be a problem.
My DocumentViewer already supports pdf and djvu. And I already ported chm, epub, .... libs, that would need just little work, to make documentviewer also support this formats.
The GUI of DocumentViewer would need to be adapted/changed to be fit an ebook reader, but it wouldn't be much work.
An "e-book manager" is missing, but it wouldn't be that much work to write something that can compete with software you find on ebook readers.

windows has many issues , big, no enormous ones. Linux has less but still are enormous. Haiku has its issues i know some of them but i can't complain since Haiku is still in alpha ( years ago due to my ignorance, i had thought that haiku was already in a release/stable state). So i know what you mean But things are changing rapidly, Linux is getting steam for crying out load. Come on, the damn thing doesn't have a nice working sound server. They crushed ALSA a couple of years ago so they could use a nonworking, bugged as hell Pulseaudio just because someone wanted to use the damned thing on fedora. Most games, that i used to play, don't have sound working properly like Doom 3, Prey, ETQW, Wolfenstein:ET. the only 2 drivers that works for hardware 3d acceleration are the Nvidia Blob and the opensource intel for intel gpu (Sandy/Ivy Bridge). i truly want something nice as a kickstarter campaign such a Haiku box or whatever.

Regarding past and future contracts, when we're talking about 2000€ for 160 hours, don't forget taxes, an independent contractor is just like a business (here at least) and has to pay taxes on benefits, which means around 50% here in France. So it may be a full time job, but one can't seriously live with that in most cities nowadays. With all due respect to donators and the org, one must just consider that voluntary work with a small compensation.

Ever thought about a kickstarter program for getting Haiku on Raspberry Pi? From getting the operating system to work as well as develop an enclosure that reeks of Haiku branding?? And then Haiku Inc. could sell the devices cheaply and the community could provide some sort of support channel (similar to other communities and their support channels).

The Raspberry Pi version of the ARM port was last worked on 3 months ago by Alexander von Gluck, as one of his side projects:
http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=93d5b79f068007d0504f3732d4b675...

It was not abandoned, the few people involved just had other things to do... I'm still very much interested in keeping it alive, and looking at several options to buy myself some more time to keep working on it....

Stay tuned!

I don't think there's any chance to get funds with a kickstarter project related to the OS itself. What i can say, and what i've learned reading the kickstarter guidelines is that successfull projects are targeted to do "something". Basically a winner project should be targeted to something pratical, to some specific usage and specific usefulness. So, people will not donate if you ask generic help in the development of the OS, or for example if you ask funds for a generic "raspberry PI port", they are more involved to donate if you show them how Haiku could work well as the software of a finished product like "Raspberry pi media center with Haiku".

I think this is matter of some "knight of fortune" which should be able to find something interesting and productive at the same time. The primary aim would be to define precise goals for the project, be sure that a project without precise and defined goals will not win. I was suggesting the idea of a Haiku-based digital audio pedal, but i think someone with some fantasy could invent something better following this way.

In the history of computing usually alliances are the exponential element for the success of a project. Don't know in pratice if it's feasible, but Haiku Inc. could consider to try to find a partner, someone selling a machine like the NEOX5, and work together to find the finances to do the work and sell a HaikuBox. I think by having two organizations behind, a kickstarter project could have more possibilities of success by giving to the donors warranties about the successfull ending of the project, the hw supplier on the other hand might have a lot of chances to sell more devices just providing the availability of an HaikuBox if the necessary funds are collected.

Focusing on ARM port, and especially Rasbpberry Pi should be 1st priority IMHO. RPi user-base is huge at the moment. We could make a custom cover build for RPi with Haiku Logo at the top, and this might be a Nano HaikuBox for everyone. Its cheap in production and should fit perfectly in actual boom for RPi's. To do that we dont need to have milions from kickstarter. Of course some amount of money will help a lot.

In the part of the world that I live in - a good senior programmer should earn about 90-100 K$ (thats about 75K euro) per year. Normal office hours total about 2000 hours per year, so thats something like 37 euro per hour. I am quoting a Salary rate here - not a 'consultant rate'.

I have nothing but admiration and respect to our Haiku developers who choose to make the sacrifices they do. Taking such low paying contracts, working on Haiku. But those low rates are the reason they simply cannot work them very long.

To really make 'full time' development worth their while, we should be paying them the equivalent of consultant rates (maybe 50% higher) of 50-60 euro per hour. Then, and only then, could they work long term for Haiku, and keep their families happy.

if anything, there would have to be some application. windows was the office (and then gaming) os, mac os for graphic design, linux for servers and power users... each of these has an identity that persists in a wider cultural narrative. there's a reason beos was called the media os even before it really could be one, and there's a reason so many development efforts now -- from osx to kde -- are attempting to reimplement things just now that beos had done in the '90s. considering where production hardware is going right now, it's a damn fine time to push haiku as the heart of an independent production studio. much of the backend to support it is already there (which is what got me here in the first place), there's just some polish missing (and i don't mean the gui).