hcd2008

We're very glad that Haiku has been part of Google's Summer of Code this year again. We were granted five student projects to improve Haiku. But since we had so many good and worthwhile project proposals, we set out to start our very own Haiku Code Drive. We asked for your help in the form of donations, and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response we got from you, our community: we were able to sponsor 4 more student projects to work on Haiku.

Yes, of course, you know all of that already. The reason for this review is that, since both coding events are officially over by now, I wanted to give you an overview of what has happened, and how the students fared. Not all projects have been success stories, but we were lucky to have found some very talented students this year. We're glad we had you!

Google Summer of Code 2008

• Andrej Spielmann has implemented sub-pixel antialiased rendering in the app_server. He was probably the only student that was always ahead of his schedule, and could even deliver more than originally anticipated. He also easily adapted to our coding style and produced a lot of quality code.
• Dustin Howett intended to implement HPET support. At first, he struggled a bit with how to implement this in the best way, but eventually he found his way through this complex topic. However, he wasn't able to finish his project in time, and intends to keep working on it in the weeks to come.
• Zhao Shuai implemented swap file support in the kernel that has recently been enabled. While it would be fair to say that the FreeBSD implementation and his mentor, Ingo Weinhold, helped him out a lot, he was very receptive of critics and always willing to try to understand how the kernel internals are working. In the beginning, he also wrote some overview documents about our virtual memory subsystem.
• Alexandru Roman intended to add Zeroconf support to Haiku. However, he took a summer semester at school, and was surprised about the time commitment it asked for. He contacted his mentor, Ryan Leavengood, early on, and we're sad that he didn't manage to work on his project at all.
• Adrien Lemaire was supposed to write a CIFS client for Haiku to let it access Windows shares. However, he was a bit overstrained with the project despite his nice application. He also didn't find the time to dig into the project, and unfortunately didn't deliver anything.

Haiku Code Drive 2008

• Salvatore Benedetto intended to identify and fix most, if not all, of the remaining BFS bugs by first porting bonnie++ to Haiku. The plan was to add the missing functionality to Haiku that bonnie++ needs to run, in this case POSIX XSI semaphores. He experimented a lot with BFS, and we were able to fix several bugs together. He also implemented not only XSI semaphores, but also XSI message queues, and intends to complete his work by eventually adding support for XSI shared memory. During his project, he also ported the UDF file system to Haiku's current file system API. We're looking forward to see more from him :-)
• Jovan Ivankovic was supposed to port CUPS, or parts of CUPS and integrate them with the Haiku printing layer. Unfortunately, he was not able to work much on it due to his health situation. We wish him the best!
• Yin Qiu wanted to complete our ICMP handling in the networking stack. While he had a hard time with our coding style, he found his way through the stack, and came up with a good looking solution for error propagation and handling. Unfortunately it doesn't work yet okay, and is therefore not part of our repository yet, but he's continuing to work on his patch set. And we're patiently waiting for it :-)
• JiSheng Zhang has written a DV media node based on the Firewire stack he ported as part of last year's Google Summer of Code. As far as I understand, he couldn't really test his work yet, though, as his Firewire hardware got lost at Olympia. In any case, he intends to stay with us to improve his work in the future.

So while we had our failures, overall we're very happy with our students. We hope to refine our selection process for next year, if we're lucky enough to be part of the Summer of Code in 2009.

And since our own Haiku Code Drive was so successful this year (even if we saved a bit of the money), we plan to continue this project in the future as well. On behalf of Haiku, let me thank you, the donors, again for making this possible.

I would also like to thank our mentors that have devoted much time for their students, and guided them through their projects.

It's been one week since we kicked off the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program, and the response so far has been absolutely awesome: in just seven days the community has contributed more than US$5,000 to fund the program, and the donations keep coming in! This is happening thanks to the generosity of the community, and now you have the opportunity to influence where you want the funds that you donated to go:

The Haiku Code Drive 2008 Poll has started and will run until May 29, 11:59 (US PST), so go cast your vote now! You will need to login, so if you don't have an account with the Haiku website, this is a good time to create one from here.

As we go into the last week of the Haiku Code Drive fundraiser, which ends on May 29th, we would like to get some renewed thrust, so we thought we would try a couple of things. We started by contacting Google to see if they could give us a hand in spreading the word, and they have graciously agreed to post some information about this Summer of Code like effort on their Open Source blog; they have a counter that shows about 4,000 readers, so this should give us some nice exposure.

There is one more thing that we would like to try, with a little help from the community. We have drafted the following brief announcement:

Haiku, an open source project dedicated to the development of a new operating system inspired by the BeOS, has launched the first Haiku Code Drive, a Summer of Code like initiative designed to sponsor students to write code for Haiku. The program is funded by the community, who also gets to choose which candidates get to be sponsored through a public poll. The Haiku Code Drive program, initially thought out to give one more opportunity to the students that applied for Haiku in the Google Summer of Code 2008 but were turned down, has a total of five candidate students/projects. Haiku is accepting donations here until May 29th, and is holding the Haiku Code Drive Poll from May 22nd through the 29th. The results of the fundraiser and the poll are scheduled to be announced on the Haiku website on May 30th.

So, we ask that you submit this announcement to as many technology and/or open source related news websites, blogs, mailing lists, forums and/or any other venues that you think may be appropriate and receptive to the goals of the Haiku Code Drive. The goal is to reach out to a wider audience beyond our community as a means to help with the fundraiser effort (or at the very least raise awareness about Haiku and the Haiku Code Drive). You are free to edit the text to fit whatever specific audience you may be targeting, and to translate it into other languages as well; we only ask you keep the underlying message and that you do not change any of the links. We have heard from many non-developers ask what they could do to help Haiku; here is something simple that you can do, that has the potential to make a difference.

Together we have come this far. Let's make one last push to make the Haiku Code Drive 2008 even more successful.