It's official! Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine. This is one more student than last year's eight sponsored by the GSoC alone! Shown below are the four selected students and their projects, in the order that the community ranked them through the Haiku Code Drive poll:
Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API
Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port
Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation
JiSheng Zhang: DV media node
The response from the community to our call for donations to fund this program was incredible. In just two weeks, we received 120 donations from 24 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA), for a total of approximately $7,500. The promptness, degree of generosity, and global reach of the response by the community to the Haiku Code Drive is unprecedented in the history of our project, and hopefully a sign of things to come in the future.
The Haiku Code Drive 2008 offers each student $2,500 per completed project. So in order to fully sponsor four projects, on top of the community donations we are adding the $2,500 that we are scheduled to receive from Google for our participation in this year's GSoC. We consider this to be the best way to invest these funds, as they will both advance the goals of Haiku code-wise, as well as nurture the future generation of Haiku developers.
Finally, please join us in congratulating the selected students, and make sure you give them all the support and assistance that they may need. We want them to stay with the Haiku community for the long run. ;)