Try to contact them, you will be lucky if you get an answer. I actually tried to work with them, but believe me or not it is impossible. 3/4 of the members of the board are inactive, and even if you accept to work on an under-paid contract that barely pays for living costs, you are still going to write them 2-3 mails until someone open the Paypal account and pay you.
I am not really interested in paperwork as I don’t truly believe they are dishonest people. But, in democracy any communication silence should be interpreted in the worst way possible and I have the right to do so, that’s what forces any entity to behave with clearness in order to avoid doubts.
But this is largely unrelated to Haiku, inc. The inc is about managing donations, and it would be nice to at least know how much they have in the bank account. Just to know wether doing something (eg. hiring a dev, organizing a coding sprint, etc) makes sense or not.
True, if there’s something to be truly disappointed about everything related to Haiku, it is the fact that we don’t know where the project stands financially, so the people willing to support more full-time developers can easily find out how their donations influence the growth of the project. In this regard, Linux Mint does a pretty good job with their monthly reports. It would be great if the same would happen with this project.
Even in democracy, by default I prefer to treat people like they’ve done nothing wrong or good, and let them shape their image of themselves with their actions. That seems fair enough to me, considering nothing forces/rushes me to make an opinion anyway.
So even if I have the right to assume the worst, I prefer the longer road - waiting and watching how things turn out. The development part of Haiku is quite encouraging, although slower than the users want it to be, and the financial reporting sucks terribly. The ones who are supposed to do it should understand that it’s not just about reporting, but the monthly figures can also be used to make the people aware of the needs of the project, and attract more income. The lack of financial information makes this almost impossible. I hope this will be fixed as soon as possible. However, it doesn’t make me distrust the project in any way. It’s just disappointing and I feel like it’s a wasted opportunity for growing at a faster pace.
What is done with the money is clear to me. The server for the website, the repo server for haikudepot, and what else is done is in the haiku reports.
If you want to have something special developed, create an external donation collection / use, only then you can be sure in the end what will become of your money.
If I donate money to haiku donation and put it in a general pot I have to live with it that those who receive the money decide what happens to it.
You are right. And I am not assuming they steal money or something like that. I assume there should be a big problem though, because the situation stinks. I’ve also proposed them to pay a yearly fee to a business agent to handle those financial reports, and never got a reply. I asked explicitly some clarifications on that in ml:
Also, obviously it’s not that Haiku Inc. situation should block you from using Haiku, but they have still some responsibility.
There is a single server for everything and it costs about $900 a year (information from Haiku inc own website). This is way off from the $35000/year or so donation target, and also lower than the actual donation income.
So, here is an attempt to summarize what I know about Haiku inc funding:
Coding sprints: they paid for the latest sprint in Toulouse fully. They also contributed in part to previous sprints (where attendants had to pay just for the sleeping rooms, the inc would pay the meeting room and meals)
Sending people to conferences: when we attend the RMLL, Capitole du Libre, FOSDEM, etc, the inc can refund us and cover travel expenses, etc. In my case, however, my employer already covers part of it, so I usually don’t ask for a refund from Haiku
Handling money from GSoC and GCI: this is the largest part of the income ($10000 to $15000 a year I think). Google gives some indications on how the money should be spent, however: $1100 per mentor to cover travelling to the GSoC summit (2 mentors for GSoC, an extra one for GCI), this is used to buy plane tickets for those of us attending the mentor summit. $500 (total) for helping students attend our conferences (BeGeistert or coding sprint). Last year we got Hy Che to attend the coding sprint, we will see with this year students if some of them want to attend BeGeistert. Unfortunately the $500 is not quite enough to get them to Europe usually, so Haiku had to complete the funding using their reserves. And the remaining part of the money is mostly a donation from Google, we can use it as we want.
Trademark fees: Haiku inc owns the Haiku name and logo trademarks, and have to keep the registrations up to date. There are some fees to the UPSTO for that.
And finally, funded development, when a developer requests so. Even at the low pay rates usually set for this (on the decision of the developers offering to work for Haiku), this can be a quite costly thing to do, and unfortunately it does not seem possible currently to have someone safely work full-time based solely on this.
You are right, it’s perfectly possible to use different channels to fund specific things. It would be nice if it was possible to go through the inc, however, but they are currently not reacting fast enough in most cases (unless you attempt a “just send them the invoice”).
So what happened to Alex’s financial report? And when (if) this is done, what happens for likewise missing reports for 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 ?
I finished the 2017 financial analysis. Currently waiting on it to be approved by the board.
UX still belongs in discussion of Linux as long as most people continue to treat Linux as “the operating system” rather than “a piece of some operating systems”, and as long as single Linux-hearted operating systems tend to offer multiple disparate GUIs and text-mode shells that require individual configuration. Geeks tend to know better about OS versus kernel, but still tend to talk to non-geeks as though Linux is “the operating system”. Even if we limit discussion to only one operating system, such as Ubuntu, you still have all the different shells and GUIs: bash, fish, MATE, KDE, Gnome…
So, sensibly, discussion of Linux should involve talk only of kernel features and other things regarding the kernel…but in practice, most of the world treats Linux as “all those hard to use things that keep geeks up late at night trying to fix things”.
That’s why several web browsers and other internet programs are available for Haiku. WebPositive is included by default. For chat (on IRC), Vision is included by default. Various other programs can be download using HaikuDepot (which is both included by default and also has a website version).
But I believe your query diverges from the original person’s wish to be ablet to download all the needed parts separately, copy them to a computer that has no network, and just get rolling. Perhaps you meant to search for one of the message threads about web browsers on Haiku, like Otter, Cupzilla, and WebPositive?
Perhaps an idea for Haiku in the future (Release 2 maybe) would be to distribute a library of free software titles from the Depot on CD or DVD images. That way, people could download those and install offline packages easily that way.
You have min three browsers to do that. And the most sites are displayed fine.
The Webpositiv Browser is buggy and does not have the state of alpha 4.1. On haiku alpha 4.1 this standard Browser had more Power as today. I hope this will be in the future again.
I see my efforts in improving WebPositive are appreciated
The alpha 4.1 browser may be more stable (but I’m still fixing some problems before the release), but it is unable to render a lot of things in modern web pages. But ok, if you think that’s better I can disable html5 video support, web crypto, and as much features as I can so we get a more stable browser that you can’t use for anything.
I did not mean that the browser is bad, only that it makes the impression for me that the Browser can more in the past.
At least the official website should be completely displayed correct. Finally, webpositive is the standard browser.
Honestly, I do not like the qt browser. The optics, the operation, are not completely ported or the packages are bad created (writeable /write protected folders) . Here i does not can add any favoriten for example.
And since I like the web-positive more, one hopes for more.
Get your facts straight. We appreciate your efforts on WebPositive even if we don’t show it all over the place. But the browser needs more work to be able to handle all the crazy stuff going on nowadays.
With such a variety of HTML5/CSS3/ECMAXYZ support from many browsers on other platforms, we take it for granted that a browser should just work. Most of us have no idea about the amount of work required to make all that happen on Haiku, so don’t feel discouraged just because we show signs of frustration with the browser. That frustration comes from being unable to do certain things with WebPositive, not from being unhappy with your work.
I wish more developers would help with WebPositive because whatever else we do with the operating system, most of us need a good, modern web browser.
Personally, I think that the efforts of the developers are sometimes unduly underappreciated. As far as I can tell, they are working as hard as they can on the project.
We appreciate your efforts on WebPositive even if we don’t show it all over the place. But the browser needs more work to be able to handle all the crazy stuff going on nowadays.