HAIKU needs you!

We have heard you. Other areas of Haiku need some loving. Though, we need your contribution to make this awesome.

First and foremost, the package management contracts are going well and are starting to wind down. Ingo is expected to finish his last month within the next week. Oliver will have another 160 hours (spread over two months). As for actual progress, as seen in Ingo’s recent blog post, it has been amazing. Hybrids are working (even ground work is done for future possible x86_64 + x86-gcc4 + x86-gcc2 combinations!). Building and updating Haiku for new platforms (e.g., various ARM platforms) is easier for developers. The tool for building ported software, haikuporter, is much more versatile, functional and reduces complexities for porters. They have requested wide spread testing of the HaikuPM images, in anticipation of merging the changes back into master branch.

On to current news – two developers, Adrien “PulkoMandy” Destugues and Pawel “pdziepak” Dziepak wish to have the opportunity to dedicate full-time hours improving different aspects of Haiku. Adrien plans to work on our port of WebKit and our native browser, Webpositive. His first task will be to bring the Services Kit to maturation, which was a former Google Summer of Code project. Pawel desires to enhance CPU scheduler, with respect to utilizing caches better, performance on HyperThread enabled processors and power-savvy (as in wattage consumption) features. As of now, there are only enough funds to provide each developer with a single month of contractual development!

An interesting sidenote of these new development contracts is the role that Google has already helped in making this possible.

You see, both developers are former Google Summer of Code students who became project contributors. Adrien was a student in 2009 and worked on the Locale Kit with mentoring by Oliver Tappe. Pawel worked on the Network File System (NFSv4) client in 2012 with François Revol as his mentor. In 2010 and 2011, Adrien even stepped up to the role of mentoring other students. It is likely that neither of them would be contributors if it were not for their involvement through Google Summer of Code. Additionally, the donation made by Google, Inc. in January of 2013 of $5,000 is being used to fund the first month of each contract!

Adrien and Pawel’s rates are €2000 EUR and $2500 USD per month respectively. Pawel hopes to have a second month of contracting. Adrien on the other hand, is hoping that everyone will lend their support and provide him with the ability to renew his contract for multiple months. The focus of Adrien’s efforts can be revisited as needed, but we expect there to be sufficent work on WebKit/WebPositive for the immediate future.

We are asking you to come together with everyone and reaffirm, “Yes, I support for-pay development on HAIKU!".

Afterall, Haiku is something that we are attached to. Our contributors aim to provide you and all users with a refreshing experience for personal computing. Haiku is an operating system that is crafted with such dedication, care, and attention to detail. This allows us to achieve a level of consistency that is truly enjoyable to use. Simply put, using Haiku makes us feel good.

Your donations today will persist long into the future as improvements in Haiku that everyone can enjoy.

Whether it is a single donation or a recurring monthly subscription, it will help.

Give the amount that feels right for you. (Donate online)