The Haiku project is participating in this year’s “Semester of Code” (SoC) of the European VALS project. The SoC is similar to Google’s GSoC, but without the financial incentive and more emphasis on the educational side.
Its goal is to connect higher education students with open source projects to introduce them to the cooperative nature of working within a group on a bigger project. For Haiku, besides potentially extending its feature set, it’s another opportunity to spark the interest of new, eager developers with a chance to gain future regular contributors.
I have interviewed Paweł Dziepak during my private conversation with him, on polish Haiku IRC channel (#haiku-pl, Freenode). We talked for two nights, on 28 and 29 of April 2014. Paweł is known to the community as pdziepak, I am Premislaus. There are many great people involved with Haiku Project, everyone is worth interviewing - I will try to do that in the future (Ingo, Axel, Stephan, beware!). Why pdziepak this time? The big role in the decision played ease of communication, since we are the same nationality, we talk pretty often with each other on IRC channel. Besides, he is an excellent programmer, engineer with vision! Despite his young age, he doesn't do mobile apps, his field of interest are kernel architectures. Unfortunately, he didn't have current photo and he said no when I proposed him to take a stylish one, either selfie or in an elevator.
We had deep and sincere conversation about Haiku Project and Community condition. I also asked him about Open Source movement in general. The part of that I present to you below:
As most of our visitors have probably already heard in the last few days - one of the largest security disasters I can recall in modern internet history was discovered, and dubbed “Heartbleed”.
Wow. Thanks to our donors' generousity, Adrien is able to continue for a seventh month of improving WebPositive, WebKit and its related techologies. $2145 has been raised this past month! This is spot on with the number mentioned in last month's contract announcement article. If you did not hear, Adrien has started working on HTML5 Audio/Video support, specifically the audio portion. As usual, he is publishing weekly progress reports on his blog.
Within these past 4 weeks, over $1,200 USD and &EUR;900 EUR have been raised! Thanks directly to this fundraising, Adrien is now able to be funded through the month of March. With the addition of the newest monthly subscribers, we reached a milestone and now raise over $1,000 per month through recurring monthly donations!
Pawel's contract has concluded with his work being merged into Haiku's master repository. Hopefully within the next few days, he will be able to post another blog post to summarize the improvements.
Now the even better news -- the recent donations from everyone has made it possible for Adrien to continue for another month! If another $1200 USD is raised by the end of this month, then there will definitely be enough funds to keep him coding through March (At the moment, our reserves would drop to below $800 USD, which is something we try to avoid.)
Google has now announced the 20 winners for Google Code-In 2013, with Freeman Lou and Puck Meerburg being the two winners from Haiku.
This was the fourth year of Google's Code-In, and the fourth for Haiku. This contest came at a good point this year for Haiku as the package management merge happened just a few weeks prior to the start of the contest and thus gave us plenty of ideas for tasks.
This may be the final chapter of contract extensions, as the available funds will be plummeting to less than $1500 USD.
This is excellent news.
As mentioned in the last contract announcement article, the available funding of Haiku, Inc. was starting to dry up.
It had gotten so low, that Adrien and Paweł were told not to expect a third month of contractual development.
However ... Google has contacted the project and informed us of a $5,000 USD donation!
The donation is being processed and should be deposited in the next few weeks.
To simply say "Thank you." is not enough to express the depth of our gratitude.
Instead, many agree that actions speak louder than words.
This donation will immediately be used to finance Adrien and Paweł's contracts for an additional month.
There are few, if any, better uses for this money than to provide two previous Google Summer of Code students the opportunity to flip bits, not burgers.
... and by the way, Thank you Google! :-D
