Governance
The following organisations are the driving force behind the open source development of Haiku:
The Haiku development team
A group of people known as the development team runs and manages the project. They have the permissions to edit and triage tickets on the bug tracker, push and merge code to the repositories, and also get voting rights in important project decisions.
The development team is not a legal entity, but a group of people managing the technical aspects of the project: coding guidelines, tools to use for collaboration, and general direction of the development of Haiku.
People are invited to become part of the development team after they have contributed a sufficient amount of work (e.g. sending patches, submitting bug reports, writing documentation, etc.) and appear to understand the "Haiku Way" (a term we use to describe our philosophy, the overall direction of the project and the way we collaborate). On the initiative of existing members of the team, a proposal is sent to the haiku-development mailing list where the team members can veto it for a period of 15 days. If the proposal gets enough support and no one has objections, the membership becomes effective.
The list of the team members and their contact addresses are listed on Gerrit.
Haiku, Inc.
Haiku, Inc. is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that was originally founded by Michael Phipps— the founder, visionary and long-time leader of the Haiku project— in July 2003. Its objective is to support the Haiku Project, the development of the Haiku operating system, as well as the online community revolving around it.
Haiku, Inc. is usually not involved in technical decisions and is doing mostly administrative work. Their main decision power is on allocating funds to various tasks such as development contracts or buying some hardware or software needed by developers for specific tasks.
Haiku Support Association (HSA)
The Haiku Support Association is a German based organisation of users and developers of Haiku. Their objective is to promote the development and further adoption of Haiku, which is done by focusing their efforts on organizing the regularly held BeGeistert event and its associated CodeSprint.
HaikuPorts
HaikuPorts is a project consisting of Haiku users, developers and contributors, that tries to get applications and software libraries that are available on other operating systems working on Haiku.
HaikuArchives
Haiku Archives is a software preservation project revolving around the search, the collection, the archival and the maintenance of old and unmaintained applications designed for BeOS and Haiku. Contacting the original authors of the applications in order to get their permission to relicense their code with free-software licenses is also included among its duties.