I know I haven’t contributed anything but one post to this community forum, and I apologize for my lack of involvement, however I wanted to get some opinions from everyone.
Iââ¬â¢m looking at writing an article about the Haiku project (as well as Zeta and BeOS in general), aimed at the hacker community (and I assume everyone realizes what I mean by hacker – not the malicious criminal types, but the technology enthusiast with great curiosity types, the 2600 Magazine crowd).
I have a few ideas in mind, but I wanted to ask the community what kind of things they think should be discussed that would arouse the curiosity of a hacker. What aspects of the Haiku community or the project are relevant to the hacker community, in your opinion?
The benefit of getting the hacker crowd curious and involved is really just that: more involvement. And more involvement and a bigger, stronger community means a more productive community, especially when you consider the motivation, willingness, and talent of that crowd.
So, since this community is in the best position to decide what they would like to see in a article about their community/project, let me know. Keep in mind it’ll be a relatively short article, and I know there can be literally VOLUMES to write about Haiku, but alas I won’t be writing volumes, just an article.
I have a few ideas in mind, but I wanted to ask the community what kind of things they think should be discussed that would arouse the curiosity of a hacker. What aspects of the Haiku community or the project are relevant to the hacker community, in your opinion?
I am not on the technical side of things, but here are some leads:
Fairly mature, clean, and well documented API
Plenty of opportunities to implement new ideas
Relatively small and simple code base, makes it easy to contribute
Dedicated and friendly dev team
Hopefully some of the devs will also chip in, but you are more likely to get more responses if you post this on the Haiku mailing list (http://www.freelists.org/list/openbeos).
Can you share with us where the article will be published?
I’ve always thought that it’s really stupid how the word ‘hacker’ has two definitions with very distinct connotations. For those not familiar in this forum, you could substitute the word ‘tinker’ and get exactly the meaning itended – people who like to tinker and putter around with electronic stuff and computers.
were i come from hacker means tinker and cracker means malicious. but in mainstream culture you want to stray away from saying you are a hacker because of looks you will get. id like to shoot whoever it was who gave the word hacker its bad connotation.
also Haiku is a new project so there is a lot of latitude in developing the OS, unlike most Linux distributions we are not just upgrading one version to another, we are making something new, albeit based heavily off of BeOS, but still new.
The driver API makes it fairly simple to to write new drivers.
Client-server based architecture throughout the OS
high level of POSIX compatibility
open source
Agreed!
Another really big plus for Haiku is its MIT license. Has everyone seen the huge stoush in the Linux world over GPL v2/v3? Ouch … Not good!
I am thrilled that Haiku uses the MIT license, and in particular it’s great that no-one’s trying to "update" that license (therefore possibly introducing the same "version-squabbling" that Linux has at the moment).
Well, i think that a well written article could be interesting for hardware manufacturers too… so please, release it under GNU FDL or -better- a CC license.
In this way we could make “ports” into other languages legally. 8)
