The original project advertising its fork? That would indeed be unexpected… 
I’d say we wait until there’s something more substancial than an online poll.
Regards,
Humdinger
There will probably be some lines about it in the next activity report. Unfortunately the one for this month was posted a bit early and the new Senryu wasn’t announced yet
Hello Happypeople,
All apologies fur just bumping into this blog, out of curiosity, was just browsing through the internet to download something from haikuware, now gone, so where’s the value of an operating system like HaiKu if it’s not referencing to the library of origional sources for development and progression? like BeOS! I’ve been watching the latest years of development fairly, what’s public and in the media, and by now there should be loads of distributions available, at least ten, with different software licensing and to the base of BeOS not HaiKu, does that make sense to the reader. I mean, we’re looking at a lack of BeOS Software on the internet, HaiKu and Zeta being priviledged to all other derivates, and no growth in terms of the range of software offered for download. That’s my personal opinion. I’m now registered to this community and hoping to correspond more to the BeOS developing community more than in previous years. To summon this up, one two three four five six seven eight nine ten it can’t be that complicated.
Many thanks.
Best of luck.
Family Building
Oliver
PulkaMandy,
I think you are pretty much describing exactly where the future of Haiku (the OS) can be envisioned at this time.
There is the “Inc.” legal component for ownership of the name, performing fundraising, hiring contract developers, and being the legal overseer of participants in the GoC and other wide-ranging activities. With enough funds, the “Inc.” could potentially consider a semi-permanent team of coders, purchasing the Be IP and source code from its current owner, purchasing the Productive IP and source code from whoever might own it today, etc.
Many members of the current Board appear to have no more the availability of time to run it. Fresh blood is needed - and exactly how is a bit a mystery for most. Maybe an article by a current member summarizing not only how to get there but also what time commitment should be expected would be a valuable contribution.
There has been way too much negative criticisms about the progress made toward R1, the too small number of applications available, discussion of various forks, etc. However, not enough positive. Also, would the loudest critics be willing to commit some of the free time to make Haiku better?
I, for one, do not desire Haiku to become a “family” of distributions similarly to what has occurred in the Linux world. I am not a coder by training, nor have I written a sequence of code for fun or for work in ages. However, I enjoyed BeOS and simply wish that one day, before I retire, I could use Haiku in my day-to-day work.
Hello PulkaMandy,
I have not corresponded to the BeOS HaiKu community since I changed from Apple to the OS 2004, maybe once every 5 years to Stefan Assmus, but that’s most likely it.
BeOS in my community works like this since year, I am going to give you an example of today.
I was searching for a School Management Software free of charge on the internet to browse through whilst completing a School and Youth Paedagogics course. I was stumm ‘rejected’ from FreeMoodle, that I have never corresponded with in all my life before. So I was unsatisfied and browsed my University of Swansea intranet, and found Pebble Pads, and found it’s Help Manual, and found its Be icons. Now I’ve been working on a project at that uni since 1 year, undergrad now, leaving this month, and I did three translations vintage BeOS applications, still incomplete, for my course project and assigment, and it’s been the core topic throughout months. My tutor nore anyone else had pointed towards a BeOS representant at their IT when my Debian crashed, it was absolutely not on. I tried to mail Pebble Pad today, I rather don’t and wait another month or so, until another blocked ftp client makes it impossible to resist corresponding now. I was going to contact them regards banner advertising on my internet portal, I now presume that that’s too risky for my personal and career development. And that’s all.
I comprehend, that there is an Inc. in the company name. Good to know it’s not a whoever wrote that Inc there, that’s a progress, not a problem. I am not a coder, I try to avoid computers and enjoy life outside, socializing with my community and progressing my company, that has a very strong German and English root. But I can support your saying, that working with BeOS and HaiKU is looking at a financial desaster, which is why I avoid it more and more.
I do know what I learned from internet tutorials about company law and ‘board member’ is a term I am familiar with, not much but enough. I share your point of view on the clarity of information and time scope as you mentioned it, and thus I completed the Haikuware survey form today, because I realize the urgency too, and I realize that it’s worsening instead of improving, though we, may I say so, wanted the improvement long ago and we got them temporarily, because we set the values that were needed.
No matter if Haiku is developed with more leadership or more management values over the following distributions, presuming that there are some, I would really enjoy a workstation one day, that would not after several years develop in a bad investment of time and energy.
My contact details are on my internet site www.family-building.eu
It rarely happens that I blog like today, and I am soon going to log myself of again, simply because I’ve got another couple of many years of ‘Persoenlichkeitsbildung’ and career making ahead of me.
Best of luck.
Happy Pentecost
Family Building
Oliver
We already had a backup of the GoBe Productive sources. GoBe people planned to release it under the GPL or some other open source license, but they needed someone to clean it up from non-open-source component that they did not own. At the time, no one took the time to work on this. We need a developer (or a team) with the skills and time to handle this. As long as the sourcecode is not cleaned, nothing will happen.
I don't think purchasing the Be sourcecode would help us in any way. As the people who worked at Zeta can tell you (some of them are Haiku contributors now), the code is generally quite messy (they were rushing to get something out at the time), and it is also a lot out of date. The hardware we run on has changed, we made a lot of improvements and clarifications to the BeAPI, and Haiku doesn't have many bugs that BeOS did. Also, the BeOS code has similar issues to the GoBe Productive one: even if someone purchased it, they couldn't relicense it under a free software license until aafter cleaning it from dependencies on 3rd-party software. All of this only for a 15 years old code that probably wouldn't compile on any modern compiler. It would be a waste of time to do this now.
I can't comment on how to become an Haiku, inc. board member, as I've never been one myself. What I can tell is there is a public mailing list where there is surprisingly few people active. You could send an e-mail there and offer your help, or you could join the list and take part in important discussions about how the money is going to be spent (for example in the past weeks there was a contract proposal from Waddlesplash for a development contract this summer). The final vote is private by the board members, but the discussion is public. Maybe starting to contribute there is a good way to get involved in running Haiku, inc?
It’s gone, but when I go to haikuware or bebits it wants me to take a survey on some haiku based thing called senyru. Too weird. Anybody know what this is?
Back at the start of February, Ryan, who is one of the five board members, wrote that
“We will work on adding membership and more public elections once things are better under control”
No explanation or timeline was given for getting these “things” under control, perhaps it will happen later this year, or in five years or not at all.
How many of the five board members are active on that list? Now, if the people the list is explicitly for can’t be bothered to participate, why are you “surprised” that others don’t?
That’s actually a great illustration. Waddlesplash asked initially for his proposal to get an answer within a week. A week passed. A few days late, Axel noticed there was an email, and he wrote back a long reply with a lot of questions about the proposal and suggestions. There were responses back and forth and then nothing.
So Waddlesplash asked again, was his proposal now approved? And this time it took just under a day for Axel to explain that no, the Haiku Inc. mailing list of course doesn’t approve things, that could only be done by the five board members.
Waddlesplash just yesterday asked once again, now moving his deadline back to literally the day before his proposal would have him start work.
He proposed to do 360 hours of work (realistically 3 months due to sickness, breaks and other hard to foresee constraints although Waddlesplash may not have grasped that) for $3000 (so about a week’s charges for a skilled contractor). Normally I would condemn that as exploitative, but Waddlesplash is a volunteer already so I don’t have a problem with that deal. But I do have a problem with Haiku Inc (and thus the five directors) apparently either not being able to make up their minds in a whole month whether to take the deal or not communicating their decision back.
Haiku Inc. has always been dysfunctional since it was founded over a decade ago. When people form a corporation I don’t think the lawyers helping with the paperwork emphasise enough how serious this duty is, how much effort it’s going to require from everyone, and not just on Day One, but every day. Directors of a company are legally obliged to resign if they feel they’re no long able to fulfil their duties. How many of Haiku Inc’s directors resigned in a timely fashion on this basis? How many stayed on, for months and years, largely inactive but reluctant to admit that they didn’t have the time or inclination ?
I hear a lot of complaints (from you and a few other people) about how the non-profit is run, mostly here on the forum. Yes, there are obviously problems with the status which have apparently put the organization into some kind of deadlock state.
I think Matt (the current director) did agree that he has no time to continue running the org, and he is now inactive. This is not where the process failed. The problems are, there were no call for replacement, no announcement, nothing else. So no one replaced him.
I don't know the state of the discussion on Waddlesplash's contract. It would be nice if more of the discussion was public, or at least if there was some information on why it is not.
Now, what can we do about this? Complaining on the forum isn't going to get us anywhere. Complaining on the haiku-inc mailing list, which is the right place for this, has a slightly bigger chance of being heard by the board members. And trying to join the board would be a good way to attack things from the inside and actually make changes happen. But it seems people (including myself) don't want to spend their time on running the org (which takes a lot of time and is work on moslty boring paperwork tasks). So, what can be done?
Well now you’re in an awkward place. The community happily allowed this corporation to be set up more than a decade ago. The community has no oversight, it isn’t represented on the board, it has no say in how things are run.
There is no mechanism by which you can “try to join the board”. It’s an invitation only tree house club, it was set up that way by Michael Phipps deliberately so far as I can see. Nobody objected at the time. For a while Michael tried to claim that it was being run in a transparent manner, but eventually as it became clear that some people have actually seen a Free Software corporation run transparently and knew what that’s supposed to look like, he switched to just saying that they aren’t deliberately hiding anything, they’re just disorganised to the point of incompetence. Story checks out.
The situation continues to this day. Fixing it will require a lot of paperwork, and nobody has the time and inclination to do that paperwork, so most likely it won’t get fixed. Even if the present corporation was reformed into a member-owned or sort of at-large organisation with elections, (and preferably membership fees to ensure activity and provide a new source of revenue) there is no guarantee that this would suddenly produce volunteers able to spend the time needed to actually run it properly. Quite the contrary.
By the corporation? It should wind itself up, transferring out assets where that seems sensible or else destroying them safely. This will involve more boring paperwork. If there is no other way to get it done in reasonable time the board should consider paying someone to do the work - even though this will defeat the corporation’s primary goal of spending money on Haiku itself. That would be a suitably ironic last lesson for the board members.
By the community? Identify an umbrella corporation willing to host the Haiku project which meets the community’s ongoing needs. Accept that this may cost some money, and will still need at least a little bit of time from some volunteers in the community. If no such corporation can be found, or the community can’t agree on one, abandon the existence of an organised “Haiku” entity and let the project continue just as a hobby by a handful of people who don’t like paperwork. I sympathise.
I agree with you. wanted to add some bits to this.
What is think is that no matter how organised the inc. is you can’t do anything serious(like a modern OS competing with other Modern OSes on the market) using this “community driven” model. The closer it get’s to the final product the harder it is to make decisions(that’s why it’s so “not good” atm)
From my personal experience I can tell that first of all Haiku community(at least those who are active on the mailing list) is not that friendly.
Basically it’s divided into 3 groups:
1 one(70%) is packed with low end PC users or some guys in their 40’s or 50’s with websites like this http://www.goodeveca.net/ or people who hate Macs just cuz… fck ya thats why you ritchie hipster… and will gladly argue you on UI/UX(again my experience) or when they run out of arguments will just start insulting u. In short incompetent people with ambitions.
The second group(25%) of people are those who actually did something that is considered as a “big thing” for Haiku(like a an icon vector format for example) those guys consider them selves as a Founding fathers of Haiku(at least they act like that, The Sheriff at Walmart) while o.c. most of the time even their code is messy and the end result is far from perfection. They will o.c. find an excuse on that… something like “what did u expect I didn’t get paid for this”. Well I don’t care about that dude, if what u’ve done there is I’d say “not good enough” it’s not a “learn how to create an OS” club here. Or again if they run out of ideas they will just insult you. I personally find this funny.
The third group(5%) consists of much more adequate people devs, artists, advanced users, just users, but they mostly prefer to remain silent(cuz they’re tired of this just like me)
To sum things up. On projects of this scale it doesn’t matter what u did 10 years or even 5 years ago, it doesn’t matter how many patches u’ve committed. The end product is still not good enough and you’re not helping to make a radical step in whichever direction it takes u to. Simply cuz u know that u won’t keep up with that and you don’t want your name to be forgotten as well… u wanna be a Walmart Sheriff forever.
Also at most of the big OS production companies like MS, Apple, Ubuntu; Projects are done by leaders(directors), who make decisions thus are responsible for them and don’t have to argue and/or convince some random clueless uneducated ppl. “Community” is not a market it’s just wrong to build an OS on community demand(plus this community is tiny) iOS has no community nor Android nor Mac OS X nor Windows they all have their very own “Market”(consumer market o.c. and please ppl stop that bull#$@ about open source project, Blender for example is open source just like Haiku. check it out)
Unless Haiku stops this “Community” driven bull*it I see no future for this. In fact look at this OS now, check the forum or mailing lists with hundreds of (good) suggestions from users trashed just because people here “don’t” have a time to make changes to something that is made years ago(well then get the hell out and stop arguing with people). Or are just so old school and selfish that are actually happy with Haikus current state.
Totally agreed, some corp should take over the management of inc. Someone who at least knows the term “Product” or “Market” and communicates with volunteers without mailing lists but directly.
Even if I think you guys - foxnoodles, “NoHaikuForMe” (your nickname isn’t very diplomatic) - are a little bit harsh and dramatic, you hit the nail on the head. I’m one of these users who always was interested in Haiku but never wrote a line for it because the project always felt a little bit closed and “elite” (I also got the feeling the developers want “elite” developers - they don’t say it, but it feels like it).
Though I got a lot of (modern) experience about graphics programming (demoscene) and web stuff (for work) I never felt good enough to participate here. On the developer list I feel this radical and somehow negative atmosphere for quite some time now (I follow it since 10 years - but no, I don’t read each single post) and the “council” and board of the Inc. really acts in a way no radical changes are accepted (or they are not reading / don’t have time / idling / whatever). Standstill.
When I look back at the discussion about porting the whole system to a Linux kernel or some very intimate and personal discussions (like giving commit access to “Augustin Cavalier”) I decided it would be hard for me to participate because you work with very talented, hardworking but too blunt people (Stefan Assmus answer @ foxnoodles about UI/UX was indeed not nice - even if he might be right about some things - the tone was defintively not okay).
While I, on the other hand, totally respect (or even admire) guys like Axel Dörfler for their nice way explaining things and bringing people closer together. So it’s not all bad. Or Pulkomandy who is doing excellent work on the system and tries to bring news about the developement to the public.
Also I feel, beside the project management the marketing misses a lot of things. Not that the page is too old but it doesn’t announce new things (Depot, Download, Nightlies) in a prominent way and should better announce a halfway-stable nightly and not a x-months old alpha.
Not that I can decide or discuss things here fully (because yes, yes, I didn’t even code a single line!) but I want to let you know there may be a lot of lurkers like me. And sometimes, from year to year, I feel very interested in Haiku, clone the repository, build it and think about developing with you guys but from my current point of view it feels very complicated.
And when it’s like this how will it be for others trying to be part of this die-hard team?
Insult seems to be a technique you share, then. (:-/) I guess we can add a fourth group: those who are quite sure they know better than anyone else, and that anyone with a different opinion must be stupid. (I’m going by your recent posts on the development list, which managed to antagonize just about everybody.)
I suppose I should thank you for referencing my website, even if it was basically a slur, but FTR I’m not exactly a “low-end user”. I was a BeOS developer back in the day, and have contributed patches to Haiku, as well as a number of apps.
OTOH, I’m also rather frustrated by Haiku’s recent history. I’ve sort of given up working on patches or enhancements, because several times I’ve put in a fair amount of work only to have my submission ignored or just forgotten. And as I’ve stated before, the transition to PM was done in a way that upset a few people (in particular it caused the loss of HaikuWare!). Some minor tweaks would have fixed this, and there was a big discussion about it on the developer list a couple of months ago; for a while I thought some sort of consensus was reached, but again all that sank without a trace.
Despite all that, though, most of my computer time is spent in Haiku. I’m not going to drop it any time soon!
neoman
+1 I’m glad I’m not alone with those feelings.
Pete
Dejavu… Once again I wrote an entire paragraph to answer you but decided to ignore you at the last second. Just like I did last time.
I’ll just suggest you to calm down(cuz obviously u can’t help yourself from insulting me) and read my previous post one more time. I’m sure you’ll find some things in common(in a good way o.c.).
Moving on;
[quote=neoman]Even if I think you guys - foxnoodles, “NoHaikuForMe” (your nickname isn’t very diplomatic) - are a little bit harsh and dramatic, you hit the nail on the head. I’m one of these users who always was interested in Haiku but never wrote a line for it because the project always felt a little bit closed and “elite” (I also got the feeling the developers want “elite” developers - they don’t say it, but it feels like it).
[/quote]
Sorry about this, I don’t think it is what the development team is trying to do (building an “elite” feel or something similar). Yes, there are some skilled people part of the team and they did a lot of hard work on Haiku. But from my personal experience, they are always willing to help other people learn about the OS and how it is made. I think the involvement in programs such as the Google Summer of Code or Google Code-In is the most visible part of this, but it happens every day on the mailing lists or the bug tracker.
When you submit a patch, and people from the developer team review it, they will point out every possible way they think it can be improved. This can sound as an attempt to show you how they know better than you, but it isn't the case: they are showing you how you can improve and learn something new. After some years working in Haiku I think my C++ knowledge went from "none at all" to "reasonably good".
There is often some friction with random new people joining the mailing lists and sending a "let's change everything" mail. Of course there is, some people here have worked on the project for more than 10 years, in their spare time. This is not something easy to do, it takes some commitment and efforts to keep a project like this running. There is a somehow affective relationship with the project and when someone comes up on the mailing list and says "I know better", there is some skepticism. However, if people take the time to explain why the proposed changes would make things better, an interesting discussion will follow, and both sides will usually learn something new.
Not everyone can be happy with this way of working. This is fine. There are many other open source projects out there, or there is always the possibility to fork Haiku and start running things in another (maybe better) way. The Senryu project may be a good time to do this, as there seem to be enough people unhappy with Haiku and the way it is developped. This looks like a great opportunity to show these guys how wrong they are and how it's possible to make things work better!
Please, I’m not a code superhero or something. I use Haiku on my computer, I have problems with it, and I try to fix them.
We don’t have an organized marketing team at all. In the past Koki was handling most of this, but he had communication issues, probably even worse than some of the remaining project members, to the point that he was banned from the project. This is unfortunate, as besides these issues his work on the marketing side was great. Richie Nyhus has stepped up to resume the work on that side, and he is slowly putting things back in order (this started with a quest to recover passwords to all the social network websites out there where there is an Haiku account, creating a few more of these, and starting to make use of them). I don’t know if there is a mailing list for coordinating the efforts on that side, sorry.
[quote=neoman]
Not that I can decide or discuss things here fully (because yes, yes, I didn’t even code a single line!) but I want to let you know there may be a lot of lurkers like me. And sometimes, from year to year, I feel very interested in Haiku, clone the repository, build it and think about developing with you guys but from my current point of view it feels very complicated.
And when it’s like this how will it be for others trying to be part of this die-hard team?[/quote]
Thanks for voicing your concerns. I can suggest a few ways to try to know the team better. First, the IRC channel (#haiku on freenode) is maybe more relaxed than the mailing lists, so you can reach the developers and other community members in a more friendly way. You can also get more help on getting started with Haiku development there, in a more direct and real-time way than on the mailing lists.
Secondly, I think it would be a good idea to try to meet some of the Haiku developers in real life. Communication over internet is a difficult skill, that not everyone handles well (myself included). Things that would be solved in 5 minutes in a face-to-face meeting can escalate to years of flamewars on Internet, especially in public discussions. BeGeistert (once a year in Dusseldorf, Germany) is the main place to meet the devs, but you can also see some of them at other events (RMLL and Capitole Du Libre in France, for example - http://www.haiku-os.org/conference has a list of upcoming events).
1 Like
PulkoMandy
Let me translate this to a human language: "This is a community driven project, but we (those 15-ish guys up there) will continue to work in the same exact manner we did for years now. And we’ve read your complaints, your arguments but hey we still don’t care, you are all noobs and you’re all wrong. If you don’t like it GTFO there are other open source projects out there. "
Right? :rolleyes:
Ok guys. I’ve posted my thoughts and again imma have to repeat myself: “good luck” and mark my words u’ll never get anywhere anytime soon.
I’ll get back to the group #3
This is not what I meant. Let me try to word it better. The Haiku project is run by these 15 or so people, and apparently there are a lot of community members not happy about the way they do things. The Haiku project is not going to chage, becasue these 15 guys control everything (I don't know where you got the idea that this is a "community" project - the way decisions are made is clear and the community has no voting power in it).
So, the only way to get these guys out of the loop is to fork the project. This is the only solution to setup things on new grounds with another decision process, maybe more community driven, or maybe with a single guy taking the decisions at the top, or maybe with a voting process. Since the Haiku code is open source, you can take it and reuse it. I would be very happy to see the code I wrote for Haiku used in other projects. And if the fork is good, gets new features, and keeps the things I like about Haiku, maybe I'll start contributing to it and leave the original project behind.
But if all you do is complaining that things are not done right and that they should change, without taking the time to click the "fork" button on github (or whatever other way to fork the project), then, it's unlikely that anything will happen.
This is "by design" how the project is meant to evolve. The MIT license was not chosen lightly, it was chosen so the code written can be very easily reused in any project that finds a need for it. We had some success with that in UI/UX research, with the Aukland university using Haiku as a prototyping platform for some of their studies. They did most of this work outside of the Haiku project, in full independance. Then, they came back to show their results, we found some of their projects useful, and merged them back into Haiku. We got Stack and Tile and the Aukland Layout Manager (and Editor). Some other of their projects we did not merge.
Now a question for you: what would be the reasons to NOT fork and try to get along with the people currently holding the commands?
I’ve heard this a lot here and there. It’s not a part of my imagination or something.
[quote=PulkoMandy]
Now a question for you: what would be the reasons to NOT fork and try to get along with the people currently holding the commands?[/quote]
None. Speaking for my self o.c.
p.s. Basically my translation to “human language” remains in tact.
The read topic was “Haikuware”, was it not?
This is here every time the problem. Anyone start a discution and then it changed to… then to … and then to…
Its normally here 