Happy Contract Extensions!

Pawel's contract is being extended an additional two weeks (80 hours). He believes that will be enough time for some final touchups (mainly code optimizations) and to merge his branch containing the scheduler and other CPU related enhancements. The majority of his enhancements has been to make Haiku perform even better on multi-core machines, by utilizing processor affinity. Basically, that is keeping threads on the same physical part of the CPU to reduce the overhead of allowing them to be moved to another core.

Adrien will have another full month to continue making headway on the WebKit port, WebPositive and the associated Services Kit. As has been mentioned in his frequent blog posts, WebKit's testsuite has been the primary focus as it allows him (and any willing contributor!) to objectively see which specific parts of the port need improvement. Given the sheer size of WebKit's codebase (1.7 GiB without history), the frequency of commits and our limited contributor pool, the test suites are a tremendously powerful tool. It allows us to easily evaluate identifiable and reproducible issues and immediately see if a new change improves things. To put it simply, the test suites make people working on Haiku's WebKit port more knowledgeable and more efficient.

One of the principles of open source developments is the power of collective contributions to transform a vision into reality. Grass roots funding is the same -- everyone gives the amount that feels right for them, that makes them feel proud knowing they helped turn an idea into a product.

At the moment, people donate over $500 per month through recurring donations. The one-time donations can range from a few hundred to over a thousand per month. The average of the past four months (since the start of these contracts) is $2100 USD, which is quite astonishing when you think about it.

As mentioned earlier, without additional funding this will be the last round of contract extensions. Funding Adrien costs $2800 USD per month, which is less than $18 USD per hour. We believe that 40 new monthly subscribers of $25 per month will allow Adrien to continue contractual development for many additional months. This is our goal. Please, help make it a reality.

We are asking you to make a contribution today.

Thank you.