There actually is a market for Haiku. People are tired of being spied on by Microsoft, for starters. Windows 10 spies on people no matter what they do. Meanwhile, Linux is not as fast in some ways as Haiku. On top of this, other people are tired of paying too much for Apple’s computers or they feel like Apple takes too much money (30%) from the App Store when they write software.
Like I said in another post, elementary OS, which is a Linux distro, has 19.5K followers. Everyone on the Haiku team should investigate that project and see what they are doing differently. They are gaining a lot of support for some reason. And they are just ripping off the Mac OS interface.
You does not really compare haiku with linux this way. The resource of tutorials, forum, supports of other distros are much better and bigger as for haiku.
Yes i have the same thinking about a team leader to set the way to go, but i understand the developers here araund too. The most if them does not avtive in this forum becauae they want to use there spare time besides her family, job, sports to work on the own haiku project to fixing bugs, working to habe a beta system in the future.
And a distro is a system build on a running ground of linux. This is on haiku possible too, but we need a ground system first. Linux is so much longer at development as haiku.
There is already software for the Haiku operating system. The BeOS API is already pretty solid. I have looked at it and I think it would be a lot harder to start an operating system from scratch than finish Haiku.
People want a different operating system besides Windows 10. Professionals also don’t want to have to buy Apple hardware because a lot of it is underpowered or expensive. If I have the opportunity, I will get some investment money somehow and hire full-time developers. So this is what I am interested in right now. If I cannot do it in the end, so be it. But I am interested to see if I can.
Do you miss that huge piggy money box image with a Submit a donation button right bellow on Haiku website frontpage!? Its one-click away to Haiku Inc. website, the entity to contact for donation…
It’s been there since years.
If you DID want to raise money for Haiku, you DIDN’T look very hard on how to do it, then.
“Raising money” does not mean something that small-- clicking on a piggy bank. Some people might donate $100,000 if they were approached on the phone or in person and they would need someone to talk to personally, like me, before that happens.
Phoudoin: This is really a problem on your part that you are so quick to antagonize people who try to help the project. Your expertise is obviously programming and not running a startup, so why don’t you ask questions on this matter rather than give negative responses that would turn someone sour towards you?
Yes, we all know there is a big piggy bank. In fact, since you don’t know, a big piggy bank on the front of the website FOR YEARS makes the entire project look like it is struggling.
Have you ever worked on a startup before? Raising money means getting large donors to donate money. They don’t do it by clicking on a big pig on the front of a website, on a whim. You have to actually talk to people. This involves a lot more than writing C++, which is an essential job, but does not encompass what it would take to bring this project to a new level.
Not all here are so apathic but the main devs are more conservatives, and they are the hearth of this system, you can in other hand make a distro with no deal on this deep part, can update some superficial parts an can get money, it could be better or more popular than haiku with some of luck, i am thinking it all the time and you dont need figth with the difference of people… haiku itself is like kernel.org … you can start to work on it without see torvalds anyway.
Because so far I didn’t realized I was involved in running a startup ? Since when?
And I’m not sure to understand where such startup you seems to be proposing to set up will stand regarding Haiku project, an open source project. Something similar to Canonical for Ubuntu or the Mozilla foundation for Firefox ?
Anyway, John, if you want to hellp Haiku project by raising some money, you now know how to contact someone at Haiku inc.
Who should spend so much money to haiku? Haiku is alpha and there is no market for it. You can make some posts of this if we have one, but at the moment we should see that the main system is ready for rc.
If you have an idea to push haiku, do it. Make a distribution, collect devs for your project and go on.
Yes, dude should make a distro, attract the devs outside of the realm of post-BeOS/Haiku, that are dissatisfied with the ways of current Haiku team and it’s leadership (or lack thereof) and raise so much money. That’ll show them.
I think a maverick like Mr Pratt is good to shake things up now and then. He’s probably rough around the edges, but with a heart of gold.
Here’s a thought based on Mr Pratt’s line of thinking. One thing people do to advance projects is to form groups that attract members (and donations) - like Linux and Open Source foundations ; or they organize friendly competitions (with a big prize for winners) - like Pwn2Own, or the X-prize in space travel.
So why don’t all the alternative operating systems get together to form a group (the Alternative Operating System Foundation?), and attract members (& donations, then split the money) - or approach Google or someone to put up some prize money (the Z-prize?) for competing alternative operating systems to reach R1.
Because we don’t need money, currently. Haiku is not a company. It is a project people are contributing to for fun and by passion. It could go so long without any management because of this. Over the years we have assembled a team of people with a common vision about what the OS should be. You cannot achieve anything similar by hiring random devs. So, Haiku as a company would simply not work.
This is why our answer is always the same when someone wants to do something like that: fork our sourcecode and create a company. I think most Haiku devs would be relieved to know someone is working on the OS and would use their free time to work on apps instead. It is not an agressive rejection of people willing to help, it’s just that for us, that wouldn’t be the Haiku project anymore.
On getting money, the way GSoC and GCI work is actually quite good (both the GSoC students and the project get paid for their work). The most important thing we get from there, however, is new contributors (remember that I would likely not be here without GSoC).
As for collaborating with other projects, we do it on the technical side when possible, and we should do more of that. But on funding? Would people donate to a random set of OS more than they donate to a specific one? How would we share the funds? I fell it would create more problems than it solves, unless there is a real common target (let’s say, writing a driver for some device that would work on multiple systems?). And then it’s up to the people wanting to achieve that to fund their efforts, not to the OS projects.
If you all are happy to have a company fork Haiku and turn it into a complete OS and then have you just write apps for it, well, I would be ok with that. I hope that is actually what you all want, because very often people change their minds when they realize they are not in control anymore. A lot of people have venture capital to make that scenario happen.
The real issue is that all of the code was written by people on this site and newly hired programmers would have to become acquainted with it, and at this time I am not sure whether that is an issue. Additionally, it is difficult to know whether your code is solid all the way through at this time, without analysis. Open source is very often a mishmash, though the directory structure of the repository looks alright. Because you based it on BeOS, the API, with its various kits, it is a good starting point for a separate entity.
We would still be in control of our version of the code if you make a fork. This is actually the reason Haiku is open source and under the MIT licence: so that a commercial company willing to ressurect BeOS can benefit from it.
Wether the BeAPI still makes sense for such a project in this millenia, I’m not sure however. There are many things we would like to change in it, however we are currently trying to focus on completing our goal for our first major release, which is to replace BeOS. Then, the plan is to move forward and start making changes - and to be honest I have no idea what will happen then.
You can of course also create your BeOS-like OS without our sources or from the original BeOS ones if you manage to buy that from Access Co, Ltd (the current owner of the BeOS IP, if I did not miss anything). If you do not thrust open source or our current development model, maybe that would be more appropriate for you.
A company that takes on the codebase would intend to surpass all of the current API functionality from the outset and, with a mission to make it much more usable compared to before, would eliminate the appeal of anyone working on the Haiku project. If an interested company truly did hire a dozen programmers to take over this code, and they did extend and improve it, within several months you would feel like your time on this project is a no longer needed and you would want to migrate to the new company’s codebase.
Anyone who has been with me for almost twenty years, or is more concerned with the story of beos about zeta to haiku, can probably better understand why you have such a dislike of a company with possibly resulting closed source code. After the end of beos, everyone was happy that their favorite system remained alive through the emergence of zeta. At the same time, work began on haiku. Zeta was an expanded version of beos by a company called yellowtab. The motto of this company was to create a user-related system from beos. This was achieved by dealing with all existing and then adaptations that simplified and modernized the way in which beos was handled. This included e.c. a preferences window which controlled all settings of the system via tabs without leaving this one (i miss it painfully). Or the zeta installation packages that had an animation that made the user feel like something happened (was nice gimmicks). In addition, programs were created and third made to write programs to deposit with zeta. In addition, there were some games about magnussoft. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt and emerging legal concerns (there was, I believe, but no court hearing). Since many in the community were disappointed and publicized it in public, and indeed some of once good friends were to be enemies (by bankruptcy and negative press), yellowtab has adopted and thus all sources (big bang). Therefore, there was no cooperation with haiku, because you were also afraid of copyright infringement, etc. So the problem we have today is based on the experience of the past.
Paradoxon: Why not just “start something” right away? This post is starting something-- it is doing what people call “due diligence” in venture capital and investing. I need to know what the state of the code is, but I also need to know human aspects of the community from which it came. This is the “due diligence” and every investor requires it, even crowdfunding “backers.” Business isn’t strictly a programmer’s world, where everything relies on technical implementation and pull requests. For example, BeOS, Inc. hired a wide range of people: marketing people, advertisers, icon designer(s), and more, whereas this Haiku project is, frankly, merely a programmers’ attempt to reproduce nostalgic aspects of what went on there. Nearly all participants here are programmers (and enthusiasts like lelldorin), who do not have the conditions that takes place when a variety of professions work together, like Be, Inc. had to have to even have venture capital. This is why, in my view, there is a great deal of unbalance here in terms of people’s reactions towards outsiders. I see that you believe that you are carrying the torch of BeOS, but Be, Inc. certainly had a more diverse makeup of people putting it together. I would also like to note that if BeOS existed today, they would have added enhancements by now. It would not look exactly the same; it would have evolved further after 17 more years.
The open vs. closed source debate, in my view, is not entirely complete. I believe there should be another model of source code distribution, one in which it takes meeting a certain set of criteria, either professional or commitment-wise, before a person accesses the code. It is not closed source code, but rather requires that a person be vetted or some amount of demonstration that the person will be responsible with the code and not toss it around. This is because completely open source lets anyone access code that might have required a Ph.D. and that isn’t correct every single time.
In Wikipedia, for example, nothing stops a high school from editing sentences that were written by an expert in the field. An article on there does not have to improve over time and can be totally damaged by someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about, but just wants to feel important. That just like how Linux lets people make 200+ distros of Linux, which fouls up the open source scene with half-baked distros.