That's right -- Oliver Tappe and Ingo Weinhold have been accepted for individual contracts![1, 2] Each of them will be working for two 160 hour periods. That adds up to an additional 640 hours of dedicated HAIKU development time for a total cost of €8,000 EUR. The area of focus will be Haiku's package management. (See A brief summary of HAIKU's package management. for an explanation of how package management will work.
Ok it hasn’t been years since Michael was here, on IRC passin' his time away.
To the left and to the right, commits towering to the sky.
It’s outta sight in the dead of night
Here he is, again in this project, with a fistful of keystrokes
And baby, you better believe.
He’s back, back in the Haiku groove!
He’s back, back in the Haiku groove!
(Ok, enough ripping off KISS lyrics)
Michael Lotz has been casually making commits in his KeyStore feature branch! First as a reminder to everyone, as Michael explained the KeyStore API will be able to “securely manage keys, passwords, certificates, etc. in a central place and generic way (so that it can be used by other applications as well)”. More details on its design and functionality are mentioned in Michael’s blog. As you can imagine the KeyStore API will add much appreciated functionality to Haiku, specifically in the area of managing wifi connections.
Long time Haiku contributor and Haiku, Inc. board of directors member Ryan Leavengood recently wrote an article about Haiku, which was just published in the May 2012 issue of IEEE Spectrum. For those Haiku community members who are IEEE members you can read the article in your print magazine, and all others can read the whole article online.
The Haiku project is always appreciative of any positive media coverage, and we want to thank Ryan for writing the article and the staff of IEEE Spectrum for publishing it.
Announcing development contracts is one of the best feelings.
It is a time when a volunteer developer is given the opportunity
to dedicate a large block of time for their hobby -- developing HAIKU!
This is made possible through the countless donations from people like you,
who love Haiku and are willing to give what is right for them, to make Haiku a better
operating system. Thank you to all of
our supporters, both public and anonymous!
This time, we are pleased to announce that Alexandre Deckner will be working
on the WebKit port and, if time allows, WebPositive. You may remember "aldeck"
primarily from his work on Tracker -- squashing bugs, rewriting sections for better
performance and updating it to utilize the Layout API.
As Alexandre states,
"Good web support is something crucial for any operating system these days,
it is for some users the main software they will use on a computer and one
of the first things a new user will try on Haiku. To summarize, Haiku has
to provide the best web experience possible and i believe i can help to go
in that direction."
To be honest, this article is something I have been dreading.
It's one of those situations, where you hope and pray that it gets better before you take action, but it hasn't.
Michael has landed onto some tough times.
The injury from some weeks ago has healed well enough.
However, RealLife™ has prevented him from focusing on Haiku.
It involves his personal life outside of Haiku. That's all we know and that's all we need to know.
With everything that has happened and will continue to play out over the next weeks, Michael has decided to cease the contract.
In the future, he does plan to contribute to Haiku.
For now though, he needs to take a step back.
We'd like to invite every developer to our first Bugfix Weekend this weekend March 31st to April 1st. It's an idea recently brought up on the developer mailinglist that developers should regularly meet up virtually to solve bugs or enhancement tickets from our bugtracker together.
While it's a bit short notice, it fits nicely with the 25th BeGeistert meeting that is held on that same date in Düsseldorf. That way everyone can participate in the two day hackfest even if they can't make it there in person.
Late as always the registration for the 25th BeGeistert event is now open at last. Head over to www.begeistert.org if you want to take part in it.
The jubilee event is taking place at the youth hostel Düsseldorf as usual. Many of Haiku's core developers will attend, and discuss the future of Haiku among other things. It's a social event where Haiku developers and users come together to share their ideas, and experiences, even though there will also be workshops, and presentations for those interested.
The ReactOS and Haiku projects have had a friendly working relationship for several years now, with each group helping the other whenever possible. These range from helping each other with conference attendance at SCALE and FOSDEM to development related matters. Haiku was especially helpful during ReactOS’ successful application to Google Summer of Code 2011, providing advice and feedback on ReactOS’ application efforts, and the ReactOS project remains grateful for the assistance.
The current ReactOS USB stack was started by Michael Martin, with Johannes Anderwald quickly joining in the development effort. Recently Johannes made significant progress in completing its USB stack, thanks to the reference Haiku’s USB stack provided.
Today the internet is taking a moment to protest the current US internet censorship bills.
SOPA and its brother PIPA are universally seen as limiting free speech on the internet. Many organizations including Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of others are using today to better inform the public in a non-partisan way that these bills are bad for freedom on the internet at large.
You can find more information on SOPA, PIPA, and who you can contact to voice your opinion to at sopablackout.
2011 has been an amazing year for Haiku in many ways. It is easy to
see the improvements in Haiku (the operating system) by looking at
the nightly builds or the bug tracker. In quite such a tangible way.
Haiku, Inc. serves as the business arm of the project, if you will,
collecting donations, handling paperwork, dealing with web hosting,
etc. It is a little harder to see some of the improvements in
Haiku, Inc. sometimes - they are a little more "behind the scenes",
so we wanted to take this time to talk about all of the good stuff
that has happened!
