Hello all,
A lot to respond to. I guess I am the only one from Haiku, Inc able to respond this weekend, which is kind of sad since I spent many, many hours this weekend working on a house project and it is amazing I even had the time to catch up on this thread. That no one else on Haiku, Inc has been able to respond kind of illustrates the point I guess.
Haiku, Inc. doesn’t intend to be “shadowy”. To be honest, there is not a lot of discussion that takes place. In that sense we probably could use some people like Sebrof, jt15s, and xipehuz involved with Haiku, Inc to help keep the rest of us accountable. Though threads like this can help too.
The only people I would consider “active” in Haiku, Inc are Alexander and myself, though lately he has been busy and it is hard to even call myself active. But that gives you an idea of how little input we get from the others. But maybe that is okay, and people are expecting things from Haiku, Inc that it is not intended for.
On that note I do think there is some misunderstanding about Haiku, Inc, though PulkoMandy has really tried to clarify that in this thread. Haiku, Inc really just holds the money, copyright and trademarks for Haiku, and it pays for things. That is pretty much it. Nothing glamorous. We aren’t benevolent dictators for the project, we can’t force the developers to do anything.
Any private discussions we have tend to happen on a private mailing list, or lately just an email with all the board members CCed on it. We have had basically one private discussion in the past few months. We also have the public Haiku, Inc mailing list which people are aware of. That’s it. I don’t like IRC that much anymore so don’t tend to hang out there. I think we could use another place to discuss things like one of the web-based chat systems (I know they can be bloated but they offer nice features.) I will list this as an action item below.
As for the money Haiku, Inc has: I am the treasurer and my habit is to save. We get about $10,000 in donations a year from private donations, and then in addition we get money from Google if we are involved in GSoC or Google Code-In. That has been an extra 10,000 or so for quite a few years. Our yearly expenses are not too bad, as people can see in our reports. Then we have had some people donate Bitcoin, which has increased in value quite a bit. Our only major development expense recently was for Outreachy.
So, as a result, yes, we have accumulated quite a bit of money. But as PulkoMandy points out, the amount is quite awkward: more than enough to pay our standard expenses for something like 30 years, but barely enough to hire one developer for more than a year. Developers are expensive. Now maybe someone passionate about Haiku would be willing to take a bit less pay, but it seems lately not many people have been willing to do that. As for outside developers: I think the consensus among current developers is that there is too much internal knowledge needed and a particular “culture” within Haiku that makes it harder to hire people outside the community. But maybe we are wrong.
With all that said, as I have mentioned one of the Haiku developers reached out to Alexander earlier this year with some terms to take on a contract. It was a big enough ask that it has been hard for us to make a firm commitment but I am trying to resurrect that now.
As for concerns over Haiku, Inc losing its non-profit status, we are tiny and all the IRS requires is a yearly 990-N, which is a really simple online form. I’ve managed to do that for as long as I’ve been involved. We don’t have stock and we don’t have shareholders and we don’t have any governmental requirement to provide reports. I provide them because people want them and of course we want some transparency on where the donations are going. I intend to work with Sebrof to try and give him the information needed for the upcoming 2020 report. I’ll probably still do my own report as well and we can compare them, and having someone accountable to will keep me motivated.
One last thought about marketing: Maybe people think Haiku, Inc should be involved in marketing, but frankly I don’t think that is the case. If someone wants to help with marketing just ask for what you need, whether that is access to a particular platform, some money, or whatever. There is not really a need for Haiku, Inc to be the middleman there. In fact probably the main sort of “marketing” we need now is people just blogging about Haiku or putting stuff into social media.
Here are some actions items from the above discussion:
- We need a better way for Haiku, Inc to discuss things, maybe a chat system. This needs private channels as well as public. Or maybe this forum is fine for public updates and we keep email discussions for private communications?
- What else do people want to hear from the Inc? I could see about doing quarterly updates here or on the Haiku website, even if it is “nothing has changed”, and maybe that would help?
- Sebrof will help me with the 2020 financial report and that means that it should get done faster and will look more professional.
- I will try to follow up about the potential developer contract and try to sort that out this month. In fact I will email some of you above about it to bring you in!