contracting

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. Periodically, new builds of WebKit and WebPositive are merged into the nightly images.

Once again, allow me to extend our gratitude to everyone who has and continues to donate. The yearly total is now soaring past $13000, which could make 2014 our best year yet. Each and everyone of you are helping to make Haiku a better product. Thank you! If you have not yet donated, this is the perfect time to do so.

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.)

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

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!