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you are wrong.
lack of money is the reason why most of the developers on haiku develop it in their free time.
there is huge gap in the donation, two moths has passed this year,the foundation has only got 1700 dollars donation
Iregular donations if budget is kept on service line like hostings, domains, is handable. But why is there nobody to hire for drivers, or UI accelerations or improvements? Besides @waddlesplash
The goal of Haiku inc is to hire people only if that allows them to spend more time on Haiku. So, they don’t give money to someone who would just work on Haiku during weekends. Only if, for example, one of the developers was willing to leave their paid job to work for Haiku, or some part-time solution, maybe.
They also do not pay competitive rates at all (the entire yearly budget of Haiku Inc can pay a developper at competitive rates for… maybe 3 months? (if you take into account the various taxes and stuff). So it makes sense to not advertise that as a normal job offer (that would be devaluating the work that developers are doing, we are getting enough of that from people who think we can be replaced by computers already).
Personally, I worked for Haiku inc back in 2014. Back then I had just left my job to move to another city, and I also had the support of my then girlfriend who had a full time job. Otherwise, I would have been unable to even rent a flat to live in, due to not having stable resources (the contract was renewed month-by-month, and stopped with only a 15 days notice when funds ran out).
As far as I know, this contract as well as various other ones over the years have been at quite lower pay rates than the developers would have received otherwise. Because that’s all Haiku inc could do.
Again back to my personal case: in order for me to work full time on Haiku again today, I would have to leave my job, cut my pay by 75% or so, and then there would be funds to do this for maybe a few years. Then I would be on a job hunt again. And now I own an appartment and the 25 year loan that goes with it. So I’d rather not take too much risks with that.
For a while now, Haiku inc is in a bit of a weird situation. There is more than enough money for the basic costs (hardware hosting and various administrative stuff). There is not quite enough income for a full time developer at normal market rates. We can make it sort-of-work due to Waddlesplash acecpting a lower pay than he could get elsewhere, and also because he doesn’t work full-time for Haiku, but a reducded number of hours (at least that’s the initial setup as I understand it, detailed hour logs have not been published outside Haiku inc). And also because the inc has put aside some money in previous years they can now use for this contract (even if they didn’t need to use up that much of the reserves so far).
Moving to the next step would require setting up communication campaigns, a proper budget and roadmap, etc, in order to increase income and be able to hire more people with a more stable long-term setup. Which means the next hire maybe shouldn’t be a developer, but someone who can do all this communication work to manage to go and get more donations and other funding sources.
But we can also ignore that and try to push through by only hiring developers. In that case, just waiting for someone to send their application to work at a low pay rate on a fun project. Which is OK if they really want to do it, but not something I feel comfortable advertising about.
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Why not though? If that money would motivate someone to regularly devote two days a week on Haiku development, which wouldn’t otherwise happen, what’s wrong with that?
Only if, for example, one of the developers was willing to leave their paid job to work for Haiku, or some part-time solution, maybe.
The rest of your post explains really well why this is not happening. Perhaps it’s worth looking for a more flexible solution.
Are you in that situation? If so, you can send your application to Haiku inc.
You will have to make sure that:
- This is legal (probably you need to register a company and pay taxes on that money, then sign some kind of contract with Haiku inc)
- This is allowed by your current employer (mine doesn’t allow me to get a second job in computer programming)
- You can actually handle an extra job (even paid) during weekends and never take a break (I sure can’t).
haiku foundation has only raised 1775 dollars so far this year 
, I doubt it has money to finance develpers. That’s I wish haiku get popular, more users means more donation,
Nah. I developer Haiku in my Free time, because I want to. It’s not because I lack money >.>
1775 dollars is two month’s donation, I doubt it could cover the foundation’s daily cost,such as hosting the website and sever.
So in my opinion , two months getting 1775 dollars is really really litttle,
The costs for infrastructure aren’t as high as you think,in the whole year 2024 it was only $3324.32.
In fact,the website is sponsored by Netlify,so that’s completely free.
When it comes to paying the work done by waddlesplash,the current donations are far away from the goal.
Luckily Haiku Inc. has savings that allow to continue the work for multiple years even if there aren’t enough donations.
It hurts to see that we’re so much down from the $36479 in the record year 2024,but there are still almost 10 months left to make donations grow again.
In case you don’t know,the money situation of Haiku isn’t a secret,you can read all the details in the yearly financial reports,here’s the latest one from 2024: https://www.haiku-inc.org/docs/haiku_inc-financial-report-2024.pdf
What did you expect after a year without GSoC (that usually results in a 2000-2500$ donation from Google, 10% of the budget) and without a release?
I thought that a major part of the donations probably comes from the same people every year,the hardcore fans that are always around here in the forum.
And I greatly underestimated the impact of GSoC,it seems.