The time is now: Michael Lotz on a long term contract.

Here's some of his planned top priorities

• offer assistance with WPA/WPA2 if not done
• additional polishing of usb_hid
• porting usb_scsi target (think USB CD writers)
• QEMU re-port including KVM, which allows hardware virtualization
• general bug hunting
• depending on access to hardware -- boot issues and driver issues

As mentioned above, this is something more than just a one or two month contract that has been supported so far. In fact, this would be a ground breaking event -- both in terms of utilizing financial contributions to advance Haiku and the time commitment from a developer. And you can help make it possible!

Ideally, this contract would be Michael's primary income for the entire year. His monthly wage will be 2,300 CHF per month, which works out to about $16,500 USD for the first six months. Each month, Michael will be committed to 130 hours of development time. Between the monies from Haiku's participation in Google Summer of Code 2011, the recent R1 Alpha 3 Commemorative CD and the average monthly donations, the funding for the first six months will be possible. The available funds would definitely be tight, but it can be done.

Michael actually quit his job in order to work full time on Haiku. He is currently in the process of leaving his current employer, where he needs to still stay a bit due to existing obligations. After that his contract to work on Haiku will start, which will most likely be around the end of August.

Here are some more details about Michael Lotz. He has been with the project for over six years. During that time, his contributions ranged across the board.

• most of the USB stack, including working out the host controller drivers, the stack itself and the interface up to the userland via the USBKit.
• the initial native GCC 4 port for Haiku
• various drivers, including for USB devices and WLAN
• a framework to generically handle human interface devices and the driver for USB HID devices that uses it
• the recent support for IO-APICs and IRQ routing to get many previously non-usable devices working (read more at Haikuware)
• other various firsts for Haiku can be read at Michael's old blog

As you can see, he has worked on pretty much all levels and components of Haiku through hunting down bugs and implementing features.