Announcing development contracts is one of the best feelings.
It is a time when a volunteer developer is given the opportunity
to dedicate a large block of time for their hobby -- developing HAIKU!
This is made possible through the countless donations from people like you,
who love Haiku and are willing to give what is right for them, to make Haiku a better
operating system. Thank you to all of
our supporters, both public and anonymous!
This time, we are pleased to announce that Alexandre Deckner will be working
on the WebKit port and, if time allows, WebPositive. You may remember "aldeck"
primarily from his work on Tracker -- squashing bugs, rewriting sections for better
performance and updating it to utilize the Layout API.
As Alexandre states,
"Good web support is something crucial for any operating system these days,
it is for some users the main software they will use on a computer and one
of the first things a new user will try on Haiku. To summarize, Haiku has
to provide the best web experience possible and i believe i can help to go
in that direction."
To be honest, this article is something I have been dreading.
It's one of those situations, where you hope and pray that it gets better before you take action, but it hasn't.
Michael has landed onto some tough times.
The injury from some weeks ago has healed well enough.
However, RealLife™ has prevented him from focusing on Haiku.
It involves his personal life outside of Haiku. That's all we know and that's all we need to know.
With everything that has happened and will continue to play out over the next weeks, Michael has decided to cease the contract.
In the future, he does plan to contribute to Haiku.
For now though, he needs to take a step back.
We'd like to invite every developer to our first Bugfix Weekend this weekend March 31st to April 1st. It's an idea recently brought up on the developer mailinglist that developers should regularly meet up virtually to solve bugs or enhancement tickets from our bugtracker together.
While it's a bit short notice, it fits nicely with the 25th BeGeistert meeting that is held on that same date in Düsseldorf. That way everyone can participate in the two day hackfest even if they can't make it there in person.
Late as always the registration for the 25th BeGeistert event is now open at last. Head over to www.begeistert.org if you want to take part in it.
The jubilee event is taking place at the youth hostel Düsseldorf as usual. Many of Haiku's core developers will attend, and discuss the future of Haiku among other things. It's a social event where Haiku developers and users come together to share their ideas, and experiences, even though there will also be workshops, and presentations for those interested.
The ReactOS and Haiku projects have had a friendly working relationship for several years now, with each group helping the other whenever possible. These range from helping each other with conference attendance at SCALE and FOSDEM to development related matters. Haiku was especially helpful during ReactOS’ successful application to Google Summer of Code 2011, providing advice and feedback on ReactOS’ application efforts, and the ReactOS project remains grateful for the assistance.
The current ReactOS USB stack was started by Michael Martin, with Johannes Anderwald quickly joining in the development effort. Recently Johannes made significant progress in completing its USB stack, thanks to the reference Haiku’s USB stack provided.
Today the internet is taking a moment to protest the current US internet censorship bills.
SOPA and its brother PIPA are universally seen as limiting free speech on the internet. Many organizations including Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of others are using today to better inform the public in a non-partisan way that these bills are bad for freedom on the internet at large.
You can find more information on SOPA, PIPA, and who you can contact to voice your opinion to at sopablackout.
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!
Exciting times these are. Haiku, Inc. steadily marches towards being capable of funding a core developer for 12 months of contractual development. Thank you donors! BeGeistert 024 has spurred a flurry of commits, even continuing past the coding sprint. Google has accepted Haiku as a mentoring organization in its Google Code-in 2011 program. The version control system has been migrated from subversion to git. Thank you sys-admins! And on top of all this, the University of Auckland has awarded Alex "yourpalal" Wilson with a 2011/12 International Summer Scholarship for a research project in Haiku! And the university has placed an open call for additional students and visitors!
Haiku has been selected as one of eighteen organizations to participate in the Google Code-In 2011!
Once again Haiku has been selected to participate in Google Code-In. To read the announcement and to see what other organizations were selected see [1] below. Here’s some basic information on the contest:
Google's contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible, is starting on November 21, 2011. We are inviting students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:
- Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
- Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
- Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
- Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
- Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
- Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
- Translation: Tasks related to localization
- User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction
Official Google Code-In website and to review the updated rules for 2011. [2]
Over the next couple of weeks we will be busy getting our task list in order and putting together a good group of Haiku mentors for this. Many of the tasks will be for translations, so we may still need a few more mentors to cover some of those tasks. If you are interested in mentoring please let us know on the mailing list. For a preview of some of the possible Haiku tasks, you can check the wiki page we used for gathering ideas. [3]
Dear Haiku developers and users!
We'd like to invite everyone to HSA's 24th BeGeistert, the largest Haiku conference around. On the weekend of October 29th/30th developers and users meet again in Düsseldorf's Youth Hostel to code and talk and see what's new in the Haiku world. A perfect opportunity to learn of others' projects or present your own.
Currently we plan to have these talks and workshops on the agenda:
