I’ve gotten more background on this. I think the general policy of Haiku is to stay out of the political wars. That doesn’t mean the project has politics. I know there are various political beliefs among the developers, users, members of this forum, etc. It is not all left or all right or all of anything.
But having someone from the Haiku project interview with anyone known for strong politics would go against a policy of staying out of the political wars. That probably applies to you and it would apply to people strongly left leaning. For better or worse the tech community is more on the left so in reality there would be a stronger push-back and reaction for an interview with someone on the right. But if there is a political policy for Haiku it is more about staying neutral and out of politics not being on the right or left.
I’m sorry if in this case that affects you. But Haiku is supported by donations and we have not ever had a political bent so we cant afford to piss off half (or whatever the number might be) our donors and supporters. I don’t see Haiku becoming the operating system project for any political belief any time soon. I just don’t think it makes much sense.
Commenting as a long time community member, I’ve been with the BeOS community since 1999, OpenBeos and then Haiku community since then (essentially half my life, wow) and I regularly monitor the forums, mailing lists, IRC/Telegram, and have even followed Bryan for a while. In all these years, I’ve never encountered ANY political expressions in this community. This community has been a refuge from all that, and a place to geek out and enjoy all things OS technology related.
This forum thread has come out of nowhere (in my eyes), really suprised to see this discussed. Bryan, I’m sorry you encountered such a “source” which made you confused. Hopefully the earlier posts above clarified that there is no political “activity” in this community. We’re too geeky for that
We’re a really mellow bunch, most of us would be 45+ years old with teenage families. Once the kids become more independant, we’ll get more available time, and you’ll see a resurgance of activity in the Haiku space, we have a wonderful couple of decades to look forward to. Observe the insane activity in the Amiga scene between 2010-2020, this is due to the community “retiring” and having more time for hobby activities. The same should happen here.
I can confirm this As a long time porter from around BeOS PE/Pro I did quiite some work there, with retirement comming up I got more time on my hand and as people probably have noticed recently did quite some work on cleaning up/updating adding work at haikuports. Hope more will follow
I can’t disagree but my retirement is a bit too far
On the other hand I think this is a bit limiting, we can’t really rely on our retirement to boost development. Haiku is a bit different than AmigaOS, although they share the same “legacy” roots, Haiku is an OS sufficiently well suited for daily use to attract new users and developers. I don’t think the same applies to AmigaOS, IMHO.
Simply put - Politics has no place on ‘specific subject’ forums like here - often you will find it in the ‘rules’ for using the forums, along with being civil to each other, etc.
@Lunduke I think you might be lacking a general understanding of how most Opensource Projects work. All developers contribute to the project on individual basis, so no company or person can tell them what to do. The only thing that other people can do is reject their code contributions or reply to any public statement. But as individuals no one has the power to enforce their behaviour.
Slightly different thing might apply for the people employed by Haiku Inc, but those don’t map 1:1 with the Haiku project, ideally the community might fork the project and move forward out of Haiku Inc control if the majority of contributors (as individuals) agree that the policies of Haiku Inc are not good for them or for the project.
What you describe applies to FOSS projects.
Nowadays, there are a lot of projects that are open source but not free. For example, Unreal Engine is open source but the code remains property of Epic. You can’t have access to the code or you can’t modifying it without a licence.
No, Unreal Engine is source-available and not open-source. They’re not the same. Open-source licenses generally do not limit distribution or usage of software and source code, except for copyleft licenses which have restrictions to keep derivatives from becoming proprietary.
Lunduke is a primarily computer focused guy that happens to make his political opinions public… its relevant.
That said most of the developers are European and lean slightly left, but also probably just because they have an actually useful left unlike the mess in the US. Personally I’m more of a classical liberal which is technically right wing these days,meaning I almost always vote right wing. Aka principle based liberalism rather than purely “select an extreme ideology and support that untill people start voting for it because of virtue signalling”. I’m also pro small government and reduction of taxation, and against government involvement in economic regulation.
I’ve never met any reasonable person that wasn’t at least willing to talk about these things with me… and I feel most people around here are at least on that level regardless of viewpoint. In fact Haiku has mostly avoid all the changes over the last few years because they were already pretty nice people for the most part with a few glaring exceptions of major disagreements (none of which AFAIK were politically motivated).
Interesting points. Most of us are happy to hear genuine political views discussed openly
However I feel the OP posed his question in bad faith. We are not left wing - well no more than any other open source project - and Luke wanted to know why. Actually he demands we give him explanation for this. Remember the old “you are with us or against us” trope? We are told that if we are not supporting of whatever views he holds we must be pinkos (actually I am pleased to be considered such, this is not the McCarthy trials)!
Guess what? It is not the Haiku community whose political views urgently need explaining!
More fool us if we engage in such arguments ourselves in good faith. More reason we can give him a swerve until he returns with a more contrite mindset that is respectful of us and others. We do not need such “influencers” to get where we are going, it may just take longer. Better the project is slower than we sell out our values.
Could you maybe give us some hints to what this assumption is based on? Have you actually been turned down by any Haiku developers that you wanted to interview? Given your quite long history (and good relationship, as far as I can tell) with the project and the community , I’m a bit surprised by this thread.
I sure don’t. At least not on this forum.
Our policy clearly states not to discuss politics, religion and similar things. Here we discuss Haiku. Anyone is welcome to do so. Their political opinions, religious believes or sexual preference just don’t enter into it.
Just leave those at the door when you enter this forum, and grab 'em when you leave again. Avoids discussions with the bouncers…
Surely it’s up to an individual developer to decide if they want to speak to somebody or not in an interview though? And it would be totally valid for all sorts of personal reasons to refuse - e.g. if somebody had been spreading hate speech elsewhere, or they insulted your country or all sorts of things.
That’s one of the reasons why I love Haiku. Despite the fact this project has users and contributors from all over the globe and so different views on many subjects, we are all able to put that aside and work together. It gives me hope that one day, this behaviour can spread to the outside world and we can see ourselves as members of an Earth project. For someone like me, who generally has a little faith in human being, it means a lot.
It’s exactly what you say - your understanding, i.e. point of view/ opinion. Someone else might have a different understanding given the same circumstances.
Why did you come to Haiku asking your questions? I’m of the impression there’s s/th you don’t like about it. What about a more noteworthy subject than politics?
At the end of the day, code doesn’t mind if written by someone with a strong political view, some political view or none at all, and we are all people.
Since we don’t want to talk about politics, should we close the discussion? or is there an expected answer from lunduke because of the source of his displeasure?
As a long time porter from around BeOS PE/Pro I did quiite some work there, with retirement comming up I got more time on my hand and as people probably have noticed recently did quite some work on cleaning up/updating adding work at haikuports. Hope more will follow 
