I have interviewed Paweł Dziepak during my private conversation with him, on polish Haiku IRC channel (#haiku-pl, Freenode). We talked for two nights, on 28 and 29 of April 2014. Paweł is known to the community as pdziepak, I am Premislaus. There are many great people involved with Haiku Project, everyone is worth interviewing - I will try to do that in the future (Ingo, Axel, Stephan, beware!). Why pdziepak this time? The big role in the decision played ease of communication, since we are the same nationality, we talk pretty often with each other on IRC channel. Besides, he is an excellent programmer, engineer with vision! Despite his young age, he doesn't do mobile apps, his field of interest are kernel architectures. Unfortunately, he didn't have current photo and he said no when I proposed him to take a stylish one, either selfie or in an elevator.
We had deep and sincere conversation about Haiku Project and Community condition. I also asked him about Open Source movement in general. The part of that I present to you below:
As most of our visitors have probably already heard in the last few days - one of the largest security disasters I can recall in modern internet history was discovered, and dubbed “Heartbleed”.
Wow. Thanks to our donors' generousity, Adrien is able to continue for a seventh month of improving WebPositive, WebKit and its related techologies. $2145 has been raised this past month! This is spot on with the number mentioned in last month's contract announcement article. If you did not hear, Adrien has started working on HTML5 Audio/Video support, specifically the audio portion. As usual, he is publishing weekly progress reports on his blog.
Within these past 4 weeks, over $1,200 USD and &EUR;900 EUR have been raised! Thanks directly to this fundraising, Adrien is now able to be funded through the month of March. With the addition of the newest monthly subscribers, we reached a milestone and now raise over $1,000 per month through recurring monthly donations!
Pawel's contract has concluded with his work being merged into Haiku's master repository. Hopefully within the next few days, he will be able to post another blog post to summarize the improvements.
Now the even better news -- the recent donations from everyone has made it possible for Adrien to continue for another month! If another $1200 USD is raised by the end of this month, then there will definitely be enough funds to keep him coding through March (At the moment, our reserves would drop to below $800 USD, which is something we try to avoid.)
Google has now announced the 20 winners for Google Code-In 2013, with Freeman Lou and Puck Meerburg being the two winners from Haiku.
This was the fourth year of Google's Code-In, and the fourth for Haiku. This contest came at a good point this year for Haiku as the package management merge happened just a few weeks prior to the start of the contest and thus gave us plenty of ideas for tasks.
This may be the final chapter of contract extensions, as the available funds will be plummeting to less than $1500 USD.
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
If there was ever an example of the saying "Money talks and ...", this is it.
Since publishing the "HAIKU needs you!" article in late August, over $5,000 has been raised!
This is from 110 individuals who made a combined 75 recurring monthly donations and 72 one-time donations.
The yearly total is soaring over $20,000 with the help of 322 donors making 354 recurring and 322 one-time donations.
Because of their efforts and generosity, we are able to finance another month of contractual development for both Adrien and Pawel!
Thank you and congratulations to everyone who helped!
We have heard you. Other areas of Haiku need some loving. Though, we need your contribution to make this awesome.
First and foremost, the package management contracts are going well and are starting to wind down. Ingo is expected to finish his last month within the next week. Oliver will have another 160 hours (spread over two months). As for actual progress, as seen in Ingo’s recent blog post, it has been amazing. Hybrids are working (even ground work is done for future possible x86_64 + x86-gcc4 + x86-gcc2 combinations!). Building and updating Haiku for new platforms (e.g., various ARM platforms) is easier for developers. The tool for building ported software, haikuporter, is much more versatile, functional and reduces complexities for porters. They have requested wide spread testing of the HaikuPM images, in anticipation of merging the changes back into master branch.
On to current news – two developers, Adrien “PulkoMandy” Destugues and Pawel “pdziepak” Dziepak wish to have the opportunity to dedicate full-time hours improving different aspects of Haiku. Adrien plans to work on our port of WebKit and our native browser, Webpositive. His first task will be to bring the Services Kit to maturation, which was a former Google Summer of Code project. Pawel desires to enhance CPU scheduler, with respect to utilizing caches better, performance on HyperThread enabled processors and power-savvy (as in wattage consumption) features. As of now, there are only enough funds to provide each developer with a single month of contractual development!
