The allure of crowdsourcing is appealing. Notions of being able to
reach out to countless new people, who may become interested in HAIKU
and what it represents have and continue to captivate my attention. Over
the past month, we at Haiku, Inc. have researched, discussed, and
discussed some more, two crowdsourcing alternatives --
Kickstarter
and Indiegogo.
In a third installment of donation infrastructure updates, Bitcoin is now accepted! As you may know, bitcoin is a digital currency, which can be “mined” or traded online for cash and various goods and services. Donation buttons are listed on Haiku, Inc.’s donation page. For those who prefer, our bitcoin address is 1CvgfZCz9Scw3711zU1SN59Q8rvas3FgU1.
Another development in Haiku’s donation infrastructure has been implemented! This time it’s Flattr - Social microdonations. Flattr is a way for you to set a monthly donation budget, which then automatically gets divided into equal pieces and donated to people you choose to “Flattr”. You can read more about How Flattr Works.
In time, we expect Flattr buttons to be added elsewhere, including haiku-files.org and even within individual postings on the website.
Last month on the [haiku-inc] mailing list, Arman “Kulluminatii” Chahal suggested adding Haiku to Goodsearch. “What is Goodsearch?”, you may ask. It’s a Yahoo! powered search engine that will donate money (about a penny) to your favorite non-profit or school. They provide other ways to help earn money – shopping online, participating in online surveys, completing special offers and more! This past week, the registration process completed and Haiku is now a participating non profit!
In the past few weeks, I've managed to find a bit more free time to work on Haiku. As per usual, the lion's share of this time was spent on improving our integrated debugger. As such, I thought I'd give a brief overview of what's been added, and how it can be useful.
Starting with hrev45522 address space layout randomization (ASLR) and data execution prevention (DEP) are available in Haiku. These two features, which have actually become a standard in any modern OS, make it much harder to exploit any vulnerability that may be present in an application running on Haiku thus generally improve system security.
It's been almost three weeks since the previous blog post and some people start wondering what the current status
is and what were working on exactly, so it's time for an update. Incidentally the time is perfect for an
update anyway, since we've just reached our first important milestone: haikuporter supports hierarchical
building of packages.
After quite some delay Oliver and I have finally started our contracts with Haiku, Inc. to continue our work on package management. Each of us will work 320 hours in total, i.e. the equivalent of 2 months of continuous full-time work.
Earlier this week NFSv4 client I have been working on during the last year Google Summer of Code has been merged into the main Haiku repository and is now available in nightly images. The client supports all caching mechanisms available in the version 4 of NFS what means that it can get the most out of network connection and the server. Unfortunately due to limitations of the NFS protocol itself extended attributes are not supported yet.
An unexpected change has necessitated a delay to the start of the package management contracts. Ingo recently posted the update to the [haiku-inc] mailing list. To sum it up, the parts he is responsible for need to be updated to match changes by the customer. At this time, the delay could be anywhere from a few days of work or could be several weeks. The current plan is for Ingo and Oliver to start at the same time.
