Happy Contract Extensions!
This may be the final chapter of contract extensions, as the available funds will be plummeting to less than $1500 USD.
Pawel's contract is being extended an additional two weeks (80 hours). He believes that will be enough time for some final touchups (mainly code optimizations) and to merge his branch containing the scheduler and other CPU related enhancements. The majority of his enhancements has been to make Haiku perform even better on multi-core machines, by utilizing processor affinity. Basically, that is keeping threads on the same physical part of the CPU to reduce the overhead of allowing them to be moved to another core.
Adrien will have another full month to continue making headway on the WebKit port, WebPositive and the associated Services Kit. As has been mentioned in his frequent blog posts, WebKit's testsuite has been the primary focus as it allows him (and any willing contributor!) to objectively see which specific parts of the port need improvement. Given the sheer size of WebKit's codebase (1.7 GiB without history), the frequency of commits and our limited contributor pool, the test suites are a tremendously powerful tool. It allows us to easily evaluate identifiable and reproducible issues and immediately see if a new change improves things. To put it simply, the test suites make people working on Haiku's WebKit port more knowledgeable and more efficient.
One of the principles of open source developments is the power of collective contributions to transform a vision into reality. Grass roots funding is the same -- everyone gives the amount that feels right for them, that makes them feel proud knowing they helped turn an idea into a product.
At the moment, people donate over $500 per month through recurring donations. The one-time donations can range from a few hundred to over a thousand per month. The average of the past four months (since the start of these contracts) is $2100 USD, which is quite astonishing when you think about it.
As mentioned earlier, without additional funding this will be the last round of contract extensions. Funding Adrien costs $2800 USD per month, which is less than $18 USD per hour. We believe that 40 new monthly subscribers of $25 per month will allow Adrien to continue contractual development for many additional months. This is our goal. Please, help make it a reality.
We are asking you to make a contribution today.
Thank you.
Comments
Re: Happy Contract Extensions!
2013 will be known as the year of the contracts! I am pleased that we were able to extend the contracts as long as we have! I hope this proves for all time that paid development is not something to be avoided in Open Source projects like Haiku.
With all the contracts winding down, I wonder how long until the next official release will be called. Perhaps Beta 1 will be here in time for spring? At any rate, Haiku has seen a great deal of work and improvement these last few years and in 2013 in particular!
I wonder if all this work would have been done if Haiku was selected for Google summer of Code 2013? Thanks and kudos to all the donors and developers who made 2013 a great year for Haiku!
Re: Happy Contract Extensions!
I'll start subscribing for £25/month at the end of this month. Hopefully we can keep the webkit contract going... I feel like the web browser is the major missing piece for haiku right now.
Re: Happy Contract Extensions!
I just got a new job and can restart my subscription in Feb. While I don't know what the status of keeping the current contract for web development going, I hope we can. He is making incredible progress and it would be a shame to stop the momentum now.
David
Re: Happy Contract Extensions!
What is the donation target for 2014? Would bounties for particular development goals sit well with the Haiku crowd? They're used from time to time for MorphOS - for OS, application and tutorial work. btw That project is due a hardware and software architecture change and I've often wondered what the developers hope to do that would be so different from Haiku to justify remaining separate from it...
Re: Happy Contract Extensions!
Our current goal is to secure recurring (monthly) donations to hire a coder (me!) full-time. With the current way people work on Haiku (a developer team of about 40 people, most of them working in many areas), it's a bit hard to work with a bounty-based funding, because there is rarely a single developer working on a single feature, and sharing the money between devs sometimes create some tension.
About MorphOS, as far as I know they are still going for Amiga-compatible APIs. The memory model for this doesn't really match anything else (no memory protection!) and would be hard to get running on any other system. I know at least one MorphOS user, and he feels that Haiku isn't ready enough to match MorphOS yet, with problems like entering KDL if you forgot to unmount an USB device before unplugging it, for example.
Re: Happy Contract Extensions!
re: Bounties - Good point. I can see that they're suited to much smaller teams or individuals.
re: MorphOS... To date, it has aimed for compatibility - to a degree that is stifling further advancement. If it ever happens, the hardware change is likely to be one of ARM or x86/64 and the software change will likely provide memory protection and multiprocessor support. All of this will make backward compatibility more trouble than it's worth. It's possible that some API elements are still suitable for reimplementation but, in my opinion, if the end result doesn't break some new ground, the developers would just be spinning their wheels... No one has actually stated what the goals for this possible future reboot of MorphOS are but I suspect there'd be a large degree of similarity to Haiku.