Buy BeOS rights

There is a problem with suck kickstarter campaigns as a funding process. Look at the rewards. Preparing a preinstalled USB key, or computer ; getting a T-Shirt printed, etc. This all costs time and money, and so does shipping the stuff to the backers all over the world. Kickstarter also takes a part of the raised money (I think around 10%?). You also need time to setup the kickstarter, write the description page, keep in contact with the backers to let them know how the project goes. I think the overall ratio is 50% of the resources you get from the kickstarter campaign are spent just by running it. The rate may get better as the campaing gets bigger, but then the costs of handling all those rewards becomes prohibitive. I certainly don’t want to spend my time installing Haiku to hundreds of USB sticks and shipping them all around the world.

This works well if you are already planning to industrialize the process of making these items, as is the case when you start a company. It is not, for an open source project like Haiku.

Beta versions? We alrealy let everyone download them freely. Do you want us to restrict access to our nightlies and make user pay for them?

Vote rights? Haiku, Inc. doesn't vote in the development decisions, and tries to not interfere with them. How could they grant that right to other people?

On the other hand, anyone could start a campaign about bringing Haiku to R1. All you need is a coder to do the work. But remember you also have to actually get the rewards done and shipped.

Our current donation scheme seems to work rather well so far. I've been working for Haiku for the last 6 months, and it may continue this way. What I'd love is the amount of recurring donations alone to cover my contract, so I can secure it and continue working this way as long as possible. Currently the contract is re-evaluated at the end of each month, and this is a bit stressful for me, as the final decision is made one or two days before the month ends.

Can we raise a lot of money in a one-shot kickstarter campaign, and use that to secure my contract for 6 months or hire a second developer? Maybe. Will it make Haiku R1 happen that much faster? Hard to tell. We can't even get alpha 5 out, and some of the bugs remaining are things I don't know how to solve. And the devs that know already have other jobs, or want to be paid much more than I am. So, throwing random amount of money at Haiku may not fix all the problems.

[quote=Dr Logic]hi guy’s

i’m in love with Haiku … but newbe …

it’s a good job. But i think we woundn’t keep doing the same thing than other os.
Personal Computer compatibility drivers developping cost a lot of time. why not surfing on open source computer like Arduino and Raspberry move ?
imagine Haiku/wireshark and usb disk for sniffer or proxy in onboard computer.
imagine web server DDoS proof.

let’s imagine …

Can we really be sure than haiku future could be “free” or is there any DLL property of BeOS ?

Could we imagine a simple scripting language on Haiku with all access to Haiku API ?

Let’s dream …[/quote]

You have many ideas, as do the other people who are posting to this “dream” thread. It’s good to dream. There are so many dreams on this thread that reading them made me dizzy, just like I get dizzy when I’m trying to read the auto-generated spam that gets put into the comment sections of blogs. But you’re not spam, just dreaming. OK, I think the devs do their dreaming in phases. They have their dream storm, then implement dreams. Right now they’re mostly implementing stuff from the previous dream session. Yet, dream on.

I don’t think Haiku has a wireshark implementation yet, due to not having X windows and GTK. But - Haiku has tcpdump, so a wireshark readable file can be generated and then read on another machine. I have just read that wireshark is switching from GTK+ to Qt, so a port to Haiku is now more viable I suppose. As far as the scripting goes - yeah - I’d like to see further work on Python. I think that it’s partially implemented in r1a3. Hopefully, the shine and polish for it is in r1a4 or an upcoming dream.

One thing worries me! It is this constant exchange of owners of BeOS’s rights and its estate. What ensures that this new owner a day does not accept more the Haiku project? What guarantees the project has today?

One thing worries me! It is this constant exchange of owners of BeOS’s rights and its estate. What ensures that this new owner a day does not accept more the Haiku project? What guarantees the project has today?

it isn’t constant. access has owned beos for about nine years. access, inc. permits haiku, inc. to distribute the be book (with a limit in that the be book may not be modified). so, there’s already a relationship. another note: hosting the be book (and being pretty much the only host of the be book online) also grants us a lot of the benefits that having the name would’ve.

re: “haiku” as a confusing name: no moreso than apple, windows, redhat, fedora, be, plan 9, inferno, solaris, amiga…

What could they do about it? Haiku has some code from BeOS (the Tracker and Deskbar), but this is forked from an open source version released by Be. Other parts of our code are rewritten from scratch. We don’t use the BeOS name. So, none of the Haiku project belongs to the owner of BeOS. We are compatible, but that’s not enough to block us. And why would the BeOS owner try to do that anyway? Even if BeOS was owned by a patent troll, they couldn’t squeeze much money out of us…

Actually for a classic patent troll (the technical term is “non-practising entity”) small targets are a good place to start. If a troll goes after an IBM or Oracle they’ve got a serious fight on their hands. Likewise for the bigger Free Software projects, those have umbrella legal representation that can afford to take on a troll. Haiku doesn’t have anything like that, the troll would offer to settle with Haiku Inc for say, $25 000 and you’d have little choice but to agree. Trolls don’t really need the small amount of cash they get this way, it’s largely a method to obtain evidence that the patent is legitimate, “Look, these other people agreed to pay us” and then they roll that up for subsequent legal battles.

But I’m not aware of any significant patents arising out of Be Inc. The continued existence of the BeOS trademark has no bearing on patent trolls, Haiku would be just as vulnerable to claims of infringement of generic software patents regardless of its name or the disposition of the BeOS source code. The most significant basic OS patents are owned by traditional practising entities like Microsoft and IBM, and it’s dubious whether it would be worth their time to go after Haiku unlike a troll.

[QUOTE]
re: “haiku” as a confusing name: no moreso than apple, windows, redhat, fedora, be, plan 9, inferno, solaris, amiga…
[/QUOTE]

I rather like the “uniqueness” of Haiku. With Haiku, it’s much easier to cull the irrelevant bits from online searches.

Now that Haiku has been used as an operating system name for awhile, some value can be associated with it. Whatever buildup of goodwill has accrued in the years that Haiku has been using the name, is valuable, and Haiku, Inc. should keep it and retain that value. The name sounds good to boot… (pun intended).

I don’t think it makes sense for BeOS.

Perhaps it’s an idea to buy the rights to distribute GoBe Productive (only the available binaries, only for Haiku).

I think what buy a BeOS trademark (name, logo, etc) will be good idea, rename Haiku,inc to Be,inc and HaikuOS to BeOS, we resurrect her soul in new body in that case

hi guy’s

i’m in love with Haiku … but newbe …

it’s a good job. But i think we woundn’t keep doing the same thing than other os.
Personal Computer compatibility drivers developping cost a lot of time. why not surfing on open source computer like Arduino and Raspberry move ?
imagine Haiku/wireshark and usb disk for sniffer or proxy in onboard computer.
imagine web server DDoS proof.

let’s imagine …

Can we really be sure than haiku future could be “free” or is there any DLL property of BeOS ?

Could we imagine a simple scripting language on Haiku with all access to Haiku API ?

Let’s dream …

We are working on the ARM port this summer. This will first target the BeagleBone, but Raspberry may be not too far behind. Arduino is not a viable target, the AVR CPU is 8-bit and has kilobytes of memory, there is no way you can boot Haiku on that. However, supporting all the ARM based boards and chips out there is actually more work than keeping the PC port running. The hardware is much more diverse in the ARM world.

Haiku code is free software. All the parts Be didn't release as opensource, we rewrote from scratch. And the others we modified so much that very few is left from BeOS.

For scripting languages, there's yab, and there's Python with Bethon. There are some other projects (look up libcharlemagne for example).