Can copyleft force corporation to donate?

We are very much trying to build an ecosystem of apps here. If the goal was just to run existing apps, and do it in a way that’s sustainable in capitalist terms, we would do it like any other commercial company-backed project does: we would do a Linux distribution. Something like Ubuntu. That would save a lot of tim and money. If your goal i just to run existing apps, why would you pay engineers to write an entire OS from scratch? Maybe you will get them to build a desktop environment, at best. Or maybe you will just apply some custom theming to an existing opensource one. But why would you build a kernel for that?

The goal of Haiku is to provide a nice and simple system, with tightly integrated applications (I don’t think this goal is reachable in any way with ports). If you like this goal, you can donate to Haiku already. We see how much money this brings in (not a lot). But the ship isn’t sinking, on the contrary, the developer team is in full control and we know exactly where we want to bring the ship, and we’re going there. We’re going slowly, sure. But we’ve been doing so for a very long time and our passengers (or users) are happy about it, otherwise, they would jump ships, and this forum would be dead and inactive.

You think you can do it faster? Well, start your own project. Make a fork, or try bolting an extra engine to the existing one, and see what happens.

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