Hi all,
I’m an Italian computer science and engineering university student and I just knew about BeOS and Haiku.
I tried a test image with Linux and QEMU and I have to say that the work you’ve done is fantastic, I was looking for something like this for years!
I think that it’s just a shame that such a powerful, consistent and easy to use OS such as Haiku is not yet known to people.
Believe me… I built dozens of LFS systems, tried a lot of Linux distros, all Windows (except Vista), FreeBSD, NetBSD, SyllableOS, etc. and I couldn’t find an OS which let me just get the work done without showing up problems of any kind and/or let me install 10 different incompatible applications/libraries to do just a single thing.
So, keep up the good work, please!!! I can’t wait to see the first Haiku release!
Apart from that, it seems me like (correct me if I’m wrong) that at the moment Haiku is not yet usable for professional audio (missing something like jack, a good multi-track recorder like Ardour - SampleStudio and BamBam don’t look like being comparable to it, at least at first sight - and lots of other useful stuff).
Then I saw that for the second release of Haiku you’re considering whether to implement a sound effect plugin system, and here I think I can help you, if you want: I’m developing a modular wrapper for already existing plugin systems, so that you can use all plugins you have, whathever API the follow, even simultaneously, with the same program, or you can also develop a new plugin API, write a module for the wrapper, and have it “automagically” supported by all apps using it. I’ve been already talking about it more or less a month ago on the Linux Audio Developers mailing list, but a lot of them seemed not very convinced about it. Maybe you’re more open minded… or maybe not 
Well, let me know!