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.
Dedication asks each of its adherents to have faith even as time and energy pass through from one year to the next. Dedication brings with it a variety of challenges, but also rewards. Dedication is something most people claim to have, but few readily exhibit it in the face of adversity. As of today, Aug. 18, 2021, the Haiku Project is celebrating two decades of dedication, marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Haiku operating system and the start of this ride to save, maintain, and expand upon the BeOS legacy it spawned from.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 25, 2021
THE HAIKU PROJECT CELEBRATES THE RELEASE OF BETA 3
Poetry is in motion. The Haiku Project, its developers and team members announced the
Haiku operating system released its third beta release, version R1/Beta3, July 25th, 2021.
Version R1B3 continues the trend of more frequent releases to provide users and
developers with an up to date and stable platform to work on.
This release combines the best of Haiku’s history as a spiritual successor of BeOS and the
hard work of a passionate community. It provides several new features and performance
improvements that make Haiku even better.
The Haiku Project’s release coordinator for the R1/Beta3 release, kallisti5, has made the decision to bump back
the release of R1/Beta3 by one week.
The updated timeline is here.
The Beta3 release introduces an important update to Haiku WebKit, which subsequently produces some rendering regressions.
While several of the bugs have already been fixed in Haiku WebKit this
week, one final bug remains, which involves an issue with disappearing text.
RISC-V is an interesting, relatively new and open source hardware platform. The inventors of RISC-V created a company called HiFive and that company recently released a desktop-class System on a Chip (SoC) board called HiFive Unmatched. Long before this release Haiku developer Alexander von Gluck (kallisti5) had pre-ordered this board and had begun work on the Haiku port to RISC-V, making some progress on the boot loader, u-boot support and memory mapping.
Nightly and Beta2 users will need to “re-add” their release repositories to update to newer versions of Haiku and beyond. This change is part of a long-term improvement of our Haiku/HaikuPorts repository identifiers.
The release timeline for Haiku R1/Beta 3 has been approved after a 7 day RFC (Request for Comment) period on the mailing list.
If all goes to plan, Beta 3 will be released sometime after the 24th of July. Note that the release will only happen when everything is ready, so there are no final dates and the timeline may change to account for delays.
After being present for more than 20 years on the Freenode network, we are moving our IRC channels to the OFTC IRC network!
To those not familiar what’s happening, Freenode recently went through a major internal reorganization, which resulted in the overwhelming majority of well-established staff members either being forcefully removed or resigning from their roles as administrators of the network.
The OFTC (Open and Free Technology Community) has been around since 2001 and is associated with the 501(c)(3)-registered non-profit organization “Software in the Public Interest, Inc.”, which is based in New York. OFTC hosts discussion rooms for hundreds of popular and widely known open-source projects, such as Debian, QEMU, and LLVM.
The list of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2021 has just been
announced. Over the summer, four students will work on improving Haiku
and related applications, with help from our mentor team. Google gives the
students a stipend, which allows them to work full-time on the project without
the need to find another job.
The goal of the program is to introduce students to the way open source
projects work, and encourage them to become long term contributors. Several
members of the Haiku developer team are indeed former GSoC students.
Contest for Haiku System Sounds is finally over; and ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
Before going into details, lots of thanks to all participants and voters are in order. Thanks to you, Haiku now has a cohesive high-quality sound set, that will hopefully make using Haiku even more pleasant and accessible.
Without further ado, the winner is Garrett Kabler, with the sound theme “grubs-sparkly-tones” (previously named as “burgs-sparkly-tones”, name changed by the author due to a possible identity mixup)!
