Omg so many whiners here… I just asked simple question. 
1 Like
Simple questions don’t always have simple answers.
And if you want people to respond to your questions, calling them whiners may not be the best way to go about it.
5 Likes
Well, you asked for it? 
3 Likes
Ok. The simple answer is “no”.
2 Likes
I agree, It is a bit ambitious. I would suggest to go for a goal-driven, very specific fund raising. We would estimate the effort and set a specific fund raising campaign against it. For example: WebKit2 
. When we hit an intermediate milestone (i.e. 40% of the monies) a developer could sign a contract and start working on it.
He/she will serve not only as a developer but also as a project lead coordinating the work of volunteers who can pick small chunks of work up out of a backlog.
I might be a bit naïve but this what comes to mind ATM.
Would it make sense?
2 Likes
Do you have a developer in mind who is ready to leave their job to accept a short term contract like this?
This doesn’t work. Volunteers are volunteers and they are free to work on whatever they want. We already have a decentralized coordination system, it’s the Haiku bugtracker with its long list of tickets. The reason we do it this way is because volunteers can only spend a few hours per week, often during evening and weekends, and they are already juggling this with other stuff in their life (you know, having a job, having a family, having friends, etc). The only reason people can contribute to Haiku in the long term is because there is no presure and they can pick whatever they want to work on (or nothing at all, if the weather is nice and they fill like spending some time outside instead).
If you try to have someone manage the volunteers, the volunteers will just do something else instead. Personally I have about a hundred other projects I can spend time on during my weekends (litteraly, check my github page). So if Haiku is a place where some person is being paid to tell me what to do and I do the work without being paid, well, that’s not a fun project to hack on weekends, that’s free labor, and it’s not something I want to do. If you want to tell me what I work on, you have to pay me a competitive rate.
Haiku inc does not pay a competitive rate currently (they don’t have the budget for that). As a consequence, in their contracts, they don’t tell people what to do. The contracts are very open ended. That is also why they have only hired trusted contributors of Haiku, as they know they will do things in the right direction anyway.
To give you an idea of the scale of things. The current yearly goal of Haiku is $20000. My current net pay is about €36000. If I was working as a freelancer which I would need to do for Haiku because they can’t hire people as employees, I think I would have to pay about 50% of taxes in total on what I invoice to Haiku. So, if you want to hire me at a reasonable market rate, that would be something like 72000€ a year at a minimum. And at that rate, I would expect similar offer to my current paid job: 7 weeks of paid leave, Haiku inc rents an office for me, provides me with a development computer and any other hardware I need, pays for electricity and ethernet access, etc. That’s what I get from my corrent employer. Haiku inc probably won’t do that, so I have to budget these things on my own now. And also add in the uncertainty because maybe Haiku inc can’t pay me on the long term and after a few months they run out of funds and my contract stops with a 15 days notice and I have to quickly find a new job (it already happened).
You may find people in different countries would have different situations, with higher or lower expectations on the pay. But in my past contract with Haiku, back in 2014, that was the deal: an hourly rate well below the market price, no paid leave, no hardware provided, no office, nothing of that. But I had the freedom to work on whatever I wanted.
Waddlesplash can maybe say what the situation is for his current contract but I believe it is similar to this.
Even I have no idea how much work that would be. So how do we budget it?
Still, I think it is a lot smaller than most people here seem to think. WebKit2 is not a thing that will take years of effort. A skilled developer can get it up and running probably in a few weeks or maybe 2-3 months of full-time work. How do I know? Because a GSoC student did it back in 2019. In just 3 months we had the code building, running, and rendering a few webpages. And that was the work of a student with no industry experience and who had never youched any Haiku code before starting on that project.
So, that’s what I don’t understand. Clearly, several people have actually put more effort thant this in porting other web engines. I don’t understand why everyone seems to actively avoid WebKit2, which, to me, looks like the simplest and most promising solution, and, on top of that, already has 90% of the work already done.
5 Likes
The target would clearly be a contractor who has that flexibility, certainly not a full time employee.
Potentially but not necessarily, someone who is part of our community or maybe one ex GSoC student.
I don’t see how a facilitator/coordinator could deprive volunteers of their liberty. They (we?) are free to choose to contribute or not and on which already pre-digested chunk of work.
I undoubtedly respect your point of view but I don’t see how you don’t have an idea while you say that we are almost there, at the same time. Of course, Pareto may say something about it
Having said that, let me rephrase my initial stance: we could do a scope-driven fund raising and devote money to work on WebKit2, even if it’s just an initial work and facilitate the work of other volunteers i the immediate future.
Maybe we are scared by the amount of work required by WebKit2 and think it will take ages to complete it… that’s why some leadership would be helpful here.
Ok I think I made my answer too long and the point was kind of lost. You cannot directly convert money into work on WebKit2. You first need someone who is willing to do that work, to be paid for it, and an agreement has to be reached on how much money they will take, and how much work they will produce.
Not to mention, Haiku inc already has a funding effort going on: the current goal is to reach $80000 of donations per year, which would allow to pay Waddlesplash in the long term (several years) to continue working on Haiku. And part of that work is shipping the next release to get a bit more attention from the press, and from there, reach new users. And of course ideally we would also manage to get R1 out since that will probably have an even larger effect.
Until then, I don’t think it’s wise to spread resources into hiring more people? I mean, who is going to be a better deal than Waddlesplash? Can we find someone who is cheaper? Or more efficient? Or both?
1 Like
Why not fund wddlesplash first…?
Keeping the one full time payed contributor seems like a much higher priority to me.
1 Like
I think I was misunderstood. Although it’s not quite elegant to say, I myself donate a monthly amount via GitHub and I kindly invite others to do the same. No doubt about about Waddlesplash skills and high quality work. I meant a targeted fundraising on top of it. Otherwise the question is, what about devoting part of his time to WebKit2?
1 Like
I think I understand. The part time organizer can take inventory of what needs to be done and what is already done so it can be broken into tasks. The tasks can then be used as a multi-stage side-hustle bounty gig for developers looking to pick up some extra cash. Is that the idea? I know AROS used a similar funding model in the past.
1 Like
We have a bugtracker for this and it does not need a person to be paid to manage it.
In my personal case, I will not earn enough money this way to be able to leave my current paid job, so it allows me to spend exactly 0 more hours on Haiku. The situation might be different for other people, but judging from the lack of success of our Bountysource account where we had this set up for quite a few years now, it seems there are not many people interested in getting money this way. Or maybe not enough people willing to put money on these things to make them really interesting financially to work on.
Basically, the bounty system adds more uncertainty to an already uncertain situation, if you compare it to the pay-by-the-hour way we have now. That’s ok if your goal is to pay a coffee to devs or give them some pocket money, or maybe all the way up to allowing them to buy some specific hardware to debug on. But not really if the goal is to have people leave their jobs to spend more time on Haiku.
So I ask the same question again (I think it’s the third time in this thread already?): who is going to do all this work? I see no point in raising money if you don’t have someone who actually wants to be paid under the conditions you are setting up. So if you don’t have the developer(s) who want to do th work, you don’t know how much they want to be paid, what they would work on exactly, etc. I don’t see how you can start a fundraising from there by the “let’s collect money” step. You need a more solid business plan first, because we’re not talking about hiring any random developer who’s looking for a job here. We can’t afford to hire those in most cases.
No. They loose their liberty to do their personal “thing”/project. If you force them to do it your way or not at all, then many people will choose “not at all”. Isn’t that obvious? (With “you” I mean the coordinator here.)
Edit: I remember GCC has a beginner’s task list. So maybe I’m wrong and it really is possible to direct volunteers.
I’m somewhat interested but I want to learn Rust in the process. C++ versions prior to recent editions leave me uninterested and dry. Doing a 3rd party library for an unofficial web browser feature like SVG web fonts might be an interesting place to start. Would that be a desirable feature? I think writing a translator for foreign format font support might be another itch I’d be willing to scratch in the process.
Rajagopalan offered to help as he was the GSoC 2019 WebKit2 porter for Haiku. A nice gift for his continual work is suggested as well.
4 Likes
We have a whole section of the website called Contributing to Haiku and, of course, it links to our list of Easy Tasks and Most Wanted Tasks, the latter being in control of you all, by using the vote buttons that are available at the top right of each ticket in the bugtracker.
And if you’d rather contribute at Haikuports instead, there is an Help Wanted list.
Indeed for people who just wantto write code and don’t care what they will be working on, that works fine. But it is not where I send people who want to contribute to Haiku first, because I think the most logical and rewarding process is:
- Start using Haiku
- After a few minutes or maybe a few days if you’re lucky, you will have your own list of bugs you want to see fixed, and then, why not start working on those?
We are lucky that we have an OS good enough to be actually usable and not a toy that you run in a virtual machine, let’s use that to our advantage here, don’t you think?
3 Likes
Via PayPal maybe? Please advise
1 Like
I really want to work on our WebKit2 code and make WebPositive as nice as possible. I personally need a good web browser more than almost anything else (like many people.) I ported WebKit originally, so I have some experience, but otherwise it is quite different than my day job.
The main roadblocks for me now are simply general time constraints with a full time job and a family, and I need to spend the time to transform one of my older machines into a dedicated Haiku machine. I’ve had this goal for longer than I care to admit but all the minor details of that process are things I keep procrastinating on. I have a new case, more memory, and an SSD so really it is just a matter of putting things together.
Anyhow I probably said this same exact thing a year or so ago, so here I go again. But since we don’t seem to have other people who want to work on this it is probably about time I step up.
15 Likes
I’ll bribe you with cookies
2 Likes
How much to get you start working on it?
1 Like