Welcome @waddlesplash and godspeed on your and Haiku’s road to perfection!
Get Haiku to the point where users don’t complain every day about frustration and updates!
Soon a money making sponsor will get you but never lose sight of how nice and easygoing Haiku is on any
device!
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It is just an opinion reflection due to experience, I hope that sponsors do not arrive too big to want to do their own interests and divert the nature of the project, as unfortunately I have seen it happen in other open source projects.
Maybe, if we go well, it will not happen, because the rest of the world has moved on and is full of OS and is stuffed and already well polluted by the interests of corporation or political projects that want to bring water to their mill and Haiku is too small a reality to arouse such interests …
My hope is that HAIKU will grow, become usable, but maintain peace of mind by keeping us away from predators hungry for profit and manipulation.
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Agreed 100%
The WebKit build process is quite well documented and not all that complicated. What’s not fun is that WebKit is big, and websites are also big, so it’s hard to investigate them.
One thing that would probably help is enabling the web inspector in haikuwebkit, or mabe at least getting the remote web inspector working. The remote web inspector is what is used on iPhone: the web browser runs on the phone, but the inspector runs on the development computer, with a large screen and more convenient interface. If we had this, maybe it would be easier to investigate what’s going on with websites.
Haiku inc, the non-profit accepting donations, has been designed to avoid this. They accept donations, but do not have any decision power on technical orientation of the project. If you sponsor Haiku this way, you have to accept that your donations are just donations and do not grant you control on anything. Even the people you donate to don’t control anything.
Of course, a large sponsor could bypass this, and directly hire one or more developers. Then these developers would still have to follow our rules: most problematic/large changes should go through discussion and code review with the other team members, and if they attempt to bypass this, probably they would lose commit access to the repository.
Moreover, the copyright to Haiku is in part owned by Haiku inc, and in part owned by individual developers. Which means it is pretty much impossible to relicense it (you’ll need agreement from everyone).
Basically, I think we have done everything we can to avoid that situation. It is not enough to hope that things will work well, and it’s better to take some actions to set ourselves up to be prepared for the worst, just in case.
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Obviously I have nothing to criticize on the HAIKU team (I should have highlighted better in the previous comment, I apologize for that)
Mine was just a thought that has matured over the years seeing other open source projects that have gone down the drain (from my point of view, I must admit that this is also my opinion) due to the issues I highlighted earlier.
Having said that, given the “slowness” of the growth of the HAIKU project, today a point is taking shape in your favor, many people who have in their hearts the desire for a certain freedom, a certain autonomy, a desire for privacy, a desire to essentiality and “of things that are simply designed to work and do the things they have to do without hidden tricks”, here, these are points that today attract veterans of computing and the web with a lot of RENEWED curiosity about HAIKU.
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There already was/is one run by landonf (Search), but it does not have HaikuWebKit (and it often goes down for days at a time…)
It may be worth noting this somewhere, at least on the HaikuWebKit documentation, as searching WebKit’s source gets tiresome quickly…
Mine will also go down if I inadvertently unplug my NAS using the vacuum cleaner, so do not expect amazing uptime 
.
Also, webkit being monster, search performance is terrible on this repository so I can understand landof avoiding it. Expect some time-outs if more than 3 devs using the service at once. Please be indulgent 
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Looks as if the Haiku setup is pretty well protected against any nasty ‘sponsor’.
I was commenting on that because history of computing is littered with nasty stories of copyright and ‘shutdown buyouts’ to stop clever and well designed products to grow and be successful.
Keep going, keep developing and keep us ‘veterans of computing and web’ happy!
To use Haiku is a renewing, refreshing and original experience!
Thank you for giving me Haiku …
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I think that’s just LaunchBox in horizontal layout mode, it’s included with Haiku under “Desktop Applets”.
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Exactly right. And the little yellow marker on the right? Another launcher … very handy and unobtrusive
Congratulations waddlesplash! Here’s to a bright future for you and the rest of the Haiku dev team… 
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Waddlesplash, all the best to you…Expectations are high from every body, pl. dont get bogged down by these expectations…just continue your good work.
I am also a bit selfish…hoping that you will make my RTL8192EE based PCIe wifi card, W881ND, to be recognized by Haiku…
Fed up of using my laptop as a source for internet connection for Haiku on my desktop
I just wanted to follow-up on this: donations have increased pretty steadily I think mainly due to us hiring waddlesplash, but also the Beta 3 release. I even received a $1000 check in the mail specifically meant to fund waddlesplash’s employment.
We have exceeded our $10,000 yearly goal by quite a bit already so I’ve upped the goal to $20,000, though we probably need to aim higher. But I’m taking it slow. In addition the current donation total does not even include some checks we have received, such as the $1000 one, though I will update that soon.
For everyone listening here who has donated: thanks so much!
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long term, best way to gain funding, is to find a corporate Patreon who has $$$ and a use for haiku
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What about TuneTracker?
Last I heard (from this email in Dec. 2020) is that TuneTracker is no longer active due to Haiku’s purported lack of “operational stability on modern hardware”, to use their words. Not sure if this has changed since.
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Haiku is only as good as its applications. Unfortunately some of the better apps in HaikuArchives are in need of fixes that are beyond the skillset of the few people who try to maintain them. Maybe this will be an opportunity to get a developer to help out in this area.
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Having TT back would be a great PR win. I think their production machines are still on Beta 1, if I recall right.