What are people’s thoughts on crowdfunding a developer for 3D acceleration? Worthwhile or not?
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Please don’t.
All donations to the Haiku projects are most welcome. But let the few developers working on the OS focus on closing the bugs that need to be fixed so that the project can release its first beta.
3D support was recently discussed in another thread:
It is a major task and my take is that it is not something for R1.
But why not? Who say that this project should be done by the Haiku main team? If people collect money and found some one to start this project, it could be a part of haiku in the future.
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[quote=“dwt, post:1, topic:6283, full:true”]
What are people’s thoughts on crowdfunding a developer for 3D acceleration? Worthwhile or not?[/quote]
Sure. If someone organizes and maintains a crowdfunding effort for HW accel and can convince me it’s legit and there are actually experienced developers ready to start working on that contract, I’d donate.
Why not rather pay core developers getting Haiku R1 published? Wouldn’t that be the best? Be Inc never managed to get 3D implemented back in the days. This project is most likely even more difficult to complete today and let’s face it, there are not that many developers showing interest in this platform today.
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I already donate to Haiku Inc every month, but this would be separate. I’m not overly convinced that funding the Inc benefits the developers; in fact, aside from hosting, I don’t know where the money goes.
I envisaged a separate developer working on the 3D acceleration, not a member of the Haiku team. However, one of the existing contributors wanted to pick up some cash for working on Haiku, why shouldn’t they?
To make some money now. But, yes this would be a hard way. If you think of the students who working by the google summer of code on haiku, shows that this is not impossible.
For sure there are people who could do this task if money was available, outside of the core haiku developers, regardless of the performance of the recent GSoC project. The problems are that you would really need enough to pay a decent wage for at least 3 months, probably more like 6 months or a year to get any real results, and also need to be sure that the person hired has the required skills and is managed and supported well enough to deliver.
They are not bragging about it, but the inc funded renting the bedrooms and food for 7 developers to codesprint on Haiku for a full week, and also helped one of our GSoC students get there. Many thanks to everyone who donated to make this possible!
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They really should shout this more! I’m happy to see my money go to things like that! I think people would be a lot more inclined to donate if they knew where it was going…
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Yeah. Why not, appart from the same reason we probably won’t see a successful 3D accel crowdfunding: nobody actually does the founding/managing of it.
I’d donate to that one as well, under the same provisions I wrote above.
Don’t have to be core devs either. They probably won’t be core devs, because none seem to be willing to pause/risk their career or don’t have time to go on a Haiku coding spree for some months. Otherwise there would’ve been applications to do contract work for Haiku Inc.
[quote=“frankps, post:5, topic:6283”]
Why not rather pay core developers getting Haiku R1 published? Wouldn’t that be the best?[/quote]
it’d be great if the work being done on haiku were paid work but pulling people away from the work that already needs to be done inborder to do what you specifically find important would not be best. it would not be good to have hardware acceleration better than anybother system on the planet has if there’s also no usb3 support and SSDs get corrupted and the updating system is broken. there’s so much more to an operating system than running games.
Have you tried Kickstarter? Might be a good way to donate and make specific feature cases?
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I’m not sure Kickstarter is good for additional work on a product that already exists? What do you think?
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I think @PulkoMandy will mention it in his blogpost after this week is over 
But yes, the Inc really does need to get their act together on this front…
Kickstarter has these “rewards” which someone has to manage and ship. It doesn’t have to be very complicated (like, it could be just an haiku beta CD or whatever), but still there is some work to do. There is also a lot more work on keeping the campaign up, sending updated, posting videos, etc. You can’t just open a page at kickstarter and wait for dollars (or euros) to get in.
What we need is a PR team again. There has been pretty much zero activity in that aspect for the last 7 or 8 years. And I think it is not up to the devs to manage this (I’ve done the minimal life support with the monthly activity reports, but that’s about it).
i’d love to be part of this
You may have to bootstrap it, then. I’m quite involved in Haiku, but yet I’m only a developer so I don’t have much idea what PR involves. You can already submit articles to the website, start discussions here or on the mailing lists, etc. Maybe make a sticker design, or all these things PR involves (I have no idea, really). Then over time you will get known as the PR guy and we can tell other people who want to help in that area to get in touch with you.
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I tried to work with the Inc to get an understanding of where that was in the hope some funding could be forthcoming. The guys and girls on the board seem absolutely fatigued, not surprising when you consider they’ve been doing this for 8 or so years without being paid! I shall have another go and see if I can help out.
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