2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
2011 has been an amazing year for Haiku in many ways. It is easy to see the improvements in Haiku (the operating system) by looking at the nightly builds or the bug tracker. In quite such a tangible way. Haiku, Inc. serves as the business arm of the project, if you will, collecting donations, handling paperwork, dealing with web hosting, etc. It is a little harder to see some of the improvements in Haiku, Inc. sometimes - they are a little more "behind the scenes", so we wanted to take this time to talk about all of the good stuff that has happened!
A big part of the reason for all of the improvements in the code base is that Haiku, Inc. was able to fund more developer time than ever before. More than 1,100 hours of development was paid this year, including, for the first time ever, a 6 month contract! Contracts with Oliver, Ingo and Michael have resulted in massive improvements in the code. As with all of Haiku's contributors, they give of their time and their talent freely whenever they can, but you know that when YOU get home from work, it is hard to motivate yourself to do EVEN MORE work. By making Haiku their paid work as well as their hobby, we make it easier for Haiku to move toward R1.
Of course, you can't pay developers without money. Haiku, Inc. has received far more donations this year than ever. While the final numbers have not yet been calculated, we came close to our goal of $30,000 for the year! So far, that includes donations from 349 unique donors (up from 193 last year). We would like to give special thanks to Haikuware which donated $10,000 as well as $2,000 from his Haikuware Bounties project. A couple of things to remember:
- Haiku, Inc. is a 501(c)3 which means that your donation is tax deductible (of course, talk to your accountant to be sure!)
- Haiku, Inc. has (almost) no administrative overhead. All of the administration is done on a volunteer basis. This means that (almost) every penny goes to either web hosting or funding development
- Donors are mentioned on the public sponsors page (if they wish)
- Since November, all financial contributors are acknowledged with a thank-you letter
Haiku, Inc. also handles all of the trademarks for Haiku. As you all know, Haiku is open source (MIT licensed). This allows ANYONE to use the source code and build whatever system best suits them. They can choose to send us their changes or not (as they choose). This allows maximum freedom for all users. In order to ensure, though, that no one can call something Haiku that really isn't, we have registered trademarks on our logo and our name. This is similar to what Mozilla has done with Firefox - it doesn't stop true open source development, as is evidenced by IceWeasel, but it does make sure that if you download something that LOOKS like Firefox, it IS Firefox.
As we look forward to 2012, we are happy to be able to announce that we have the finances to support Michael Lotz for a SECOND 6 month term. We are also in a position to be able to consider additional contracts from other contributors who are interested in working on Haiku! We look forward to seeing proposals from those who are interested! Of course, the best way to apply is to "make a name for yourself" by submitting code first.
Thank you to everyone who has donated, submitted bug reports, code changes, or been active in any way with Haiku and/or Haiku, Inc. We look forward to a bright Haiku future!
Comments
Re: 2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
A great year indeed! Really looking forward to Haiku's progress in 2012 - Hope it's THE year :)
I kind of thought that with Michael, as a full-time employee, we would be seeing commits Mon-Fri, but there's times when two weeks go by and there's no activity. I suppose researching various issues and tracking tickets takes a fair bit of time. He must also keep a local copy of the source, works on things and submits a boat-load of work at once. i.e he submitted a graphics driver for his laptop in one shot. Needless to say, I'm not disappointed with the work he's done (well I still can get wireless networking working), on the contrary. I'm always really glad to read the reports he writes, it keeps us informed.
Re: 2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
He must also keep a local copy of the source, works on things and submits a boat-load of work at once.
That's actually the preferred workflow with a DVCS source control solution (Git or Hg for example). It allows a developer to work on an entire set of changes locally, keeping each step separated into a different commit (making it easier to review upstream), and then only push them when it's complete.
However, when a developer does this (produces a bunch of commits locally and pushes them to the public repo all a once), you should still see all the individual commits rolled into a single "hrev" or commit email.
I suspect some devs are doing this in a "private" Github clone (which would be publicly viewable) - but probably not all of them.
Re: 2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
The things that are easy to do have been done along time ago, because they were easy to do. So the work needed for each commit is quite hard.
Re: 2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
Thank you for all the good work so far! It will be interesting to follow Haiku's progress under 2012.
PS. I will start donating as well! :)
Re: 2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
Its been an awesome year for Haiku, I'd like to thank all the hard work of the developers and Haiku, Inc. I hope 2012 is just as productive (maybe more).
On a side note I Didn't realise Haiku, Inc. owned a desk
Re: 2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
Is there any ETA on the R1 release date? Winter of 2012, maybe? and will R1 include an Office Suite of some kind? The lack of an office suite (that supports Microsoft Office formats) is really the biggest reason I can't use the OS full time. The only other things I would like to see are a better browser (which seems to be in progress) and a virtualization solution of some kind. Supporting more filesystems would be nice, but not nearly as nice as those other things. Have the other things would make Haiku viable for daily use I do believe.
Re: 2011: From the desk of Haiku, Inc.
I thought some Haiku developer was working on a possible GoBe Productive replacement, which would be a great addition to Haiku for R1. Is there any news on that front?