PulkoMandy,
These are very relevant and valid points representing hurdles to proceed.
Maybe it is possible for Haiku Inc. and the owners of the Productive to establish what could be described as a master non-disclosure agreement for essentially two purposes:
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- for Haiku Inc. to organize fundraising and hire developers with the purpose of providing binaries built from the resulting code with Haiku. Any developer hired would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement as well.
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- for Haiku Inc. to be custodian of a copy of the original source code within its archives (electronic as well as a physical like a CD-ROM).
From past history, there is a very high probability that the venture will not go further than this. What will be avoided though is again “loosing” the source code as the ultimate custodian would be Haiku Inc., not an individual contract developer…
- for Haiku Inc. to be custodian of a copy of the original source code within its archives (electronic as well as a physical like a CD-ROM).
AndrewZ estimated a month of experienced C++ developer to perform the assessment and recommendations. This should be subjected to a sanity check and adjusted as necessary. From the resulting scope of work, it is a matter of establishing the budget, fundraising, and finding a suitable developer. With a well defined objective and scope, the fundraising would be hopefully more positively received than in the past.
The full scope established from the assessment would allow to approach the major fundraising campaign on a firmer footing than with budgets and time frames pulled from the air. One will need to be creative as a crowd funding campaign is typically for a product that the funding participants will get first and/or with a discount compare to the sale price once established. In this case, the product will be “free” to who-ever obtains a copy of Haiku. So, where is the incentive for one to participate in the campaign?
As I understand the history of the founding of GoBe, Productive is the third iteration for these people to develop an integrated “office suite”. The underlying concepts, refined for the BeOS/Haiku API, are likely more mature than anything which can be ported from other APIs.
I believe it is important and relevant to bring Productive to a state from which it can evolve along with Haiku (ARM binary?, X64 binary?) rather than forever being stuck in BeOS compatibility mode. Actually, bringing Productive to Haiku could be a more effective rallying point for the community than a mascot!