An excellent donation from Google, extended contracts, and Google Code-In update

This is excellent news.

As mentioned in the last contract announcement article, the available funding of Haiku, Inc. was starting to dry up. It had gotten so low, that Adrien and Paweł were told not to expect a third month of contractual development.

However ... Google has contacted the project and informed us of a $5,000 USD donation! The donation is being processed and should be deposited in the next few weeks. To simply say "Thank you." is not enough to express the depth of our gratitude. Instead, many agree that actions speak louder than words. This donation will immediately be used to finance Adrien and Paweł's contracts for an additional month. There are few, if any, better uses for this money than to provide two previous Google Summer of Code students the opportunity to flip bits, not burgers. ... and by the way, Thank you Google! :-D

As a reminder, Paweł Dziepak is improving HAIKU's scheduler and other CPU related features. Adrien Destugues is largely single handedly wrestling the beast of WebKit into submission.

Speaking of Google and people who have contributed through its outreach programs, this is time of the year for Google Code-in. If you are not sure, "Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible." More can be learned at the GCI about page Within the first two weeks (of seven), over 70 tasks have been completed by over 25 Google Code-in participants. The types of tasks include writing ".recipe" files for haikuporter to build Haiku packages (*.hpkg), fixing issues detected by Coverity, fixing issues reported in our bug tracker, reviewing documentation, as well as others. Even though the students often need an occasional hint on how to solve a particular issue, the majority are doing quite well. Many of these students are new to contributing to open source projects, let alone HAIKU. They are showing that a good amount of determination and a strong desire to help are the key ingredients to making contributions.

We invite you to help out wherever you can, whenever you can, and however you can. ... perhaps even by making a donation if you want.