I like how Bitwarden is a for profit company that employs staff but makes open-source products. I don’t know if they will be in the black when the seed money runs out though.
If the computer/operating system landscape was different then there might be some money in operating systems. Maybe that’s the real problem for Haiku. There’s no money in operating systems so you can’t employ developers profitably. The fact that it is open-source may not be it’s main problem. If computers always sold without an OS and you had to buy one separately and there were no corrupt hardware/software deals, things would be more interesting…
Also, you have to write millions of lines of code before you have a saleable product (maybe it’s not always millions, how many is it for Haiku?). That’s way more than writing an app. A capitalist startup can’t survive that long while it’s waiting for the product to be finished.
I agree that writing an operating system is never profitable in isolation. The applications that run on it is where an operating system shows its worth. I doubt that C++ has a novel enough approach to OOP to make a new ABI differentiable from other operating systems. It would take too much new software to make anything take full advantage of Haiku’s features. There needs to be a few types of apps that are streamlined by its features enough to make Haiku reach critical mass so it starts to blow away competition.
I had hoped that using the WASI ABI in WebAssembly would get a beneficial enough performance uplift from using a smaller kernel than the mainstream companies could counter with. Now it looks like Google may try to counter that by using Zircon. Can Haiku stand up against that?
I know that Haiku stands a better chance than MorphOS because MorphOS isn’t POSIX compliant enough to run WASI code out if the box (nor is any Amiga-like OS).
If Haiku’s community doesn’t get off their high horse and start focusing on streamlining porting processes and incorporating foreign function interfaces, that may be what sinks Haiku’s boat. New software without brand recognition won’t sell the OS to anybody, regardless of the fancy database driven filesystem and the streamlined stack-and-tile GUI design.
TLDR
In summary, an operating system is just plumbing, heating and air conditioning. Without applications lining the walls, the Haiku house will freeze its pipes without insulation. An operating system by itself does not make an ecosystem.
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.
I like this attitude. It cheers me. I hope most Haiku people primarily want a great foundation for native apps and continue to want that in the future. I see foreign apps as safety nets or bandages. I’m glad they’re there (especially Falkon) but they don’t excite me of give me a sense of fun.