Haiku, Inc. has hired an existing contributor to work on Haiku full-time!

Haiku, Inc. is proud to announce that we have hired existing contributor waddlesplash to work on general Haiku improvement full-time. The contract was signed on Monday, August 23, 2021 and waddlesplash plans to start work tomorrow.

In the past Haiku, Inc. has hired contributors as contractors for specific projects, such as the package system or working on WebKit and our WebPositive browser, but this is the first time someone has been hired for a more open-ended position for general improvements. We expect waddlesplash can help on thorny issues which our volunteer contributors have had trouble fixing, he can help move reviews through in Gerrit, and hopefully he can take on some bigger projects which require more time investment, like accelerated GPU graphics support.

There will still be plenty of fun and interesting projects for our volunteer contributors, but we hope this will help keep the project moving forward even when volunteers are not as active.

With all that said, we need your support! If you believe in what Haiku is building, and you would like to see the Haiku R1 release sooner, please donate to help support paying for waddlesplash’s work! Haiku, Inc. currently has a runway to pay waddlesplash for about a year and a half, but we need to increase our yearly donation target from about $10,000 per year to $80,000 to make this sustainable long term. More donations also mean we could hire even more people to work on Haiku.

You can set up a one-time or recurring donation though PayPal, Liberapay, or Flattr. We also accept checks mailed directly to Haiku, Inc. Details about all these options can be found on the Haiku, Inc. donation page. We plan to increase the options for donations in the next few weeks, likely by adding GitHub Sponsors as another donation platform, and maybe some others.

Let us all welcome waddlesplash in his new role and see what great things can happen!