Actually, I’m not so sure anymore. I mean, Karl announced to fork Haiku for his Senryu distribution. Why would he deprive its users of this big software archive? Maybe it will be back after all. Who knows, but if it does, it would make it all just a big publicity stunt.
If Haikuware comes back or not, having pulled the rug from under the feet of his future users seems a strange way to build trust in his Senryu endeavour.
Regards,
Humdinger
This page is now showing a form where you can register your interest for Senryu, a fork of Haiku.
The idea of Senryu is interesting and may change things in a good way.
It’s indeed a pity BeBits and Haikuware are down now. They were good resources for software. I’m lurking around here since 10 years now, was, as many other users here, interested in using and supporting Haiku as alternative operating system.
And I can really understand the reasons why a lot of users and even developers separate from the development of Haiku.
The makers of Haiku are really hard-working, but they aren’t good product and project managers and are not able to communicate their aims and reasons in a transparent way. All we know is they don’t want others to make decisions. Under the guise of the Haiku cooperation. Reading the mailing list reveals these deficiences.
I’m sorry, but this is a dead end. Stop being working in this idealistic and perfectionistic way, try to make project management more user-driven and agile and stop to build everything on your own. Stop to reinvent the wheels (e.g. package manager), because you never will be able to make it better than others who developed man-years on such stuff.
I am happy to refresh your memory
[haiku-development] Re: Beta1 and R1 release plan From: Axel Dörfler To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:57:32 +0100 while the plan is very developer friendly, it's also very short-sighted IMO: there is no upgrade path from R1 to something beyond. There is no plan as to what R2 is beyond a playfield for developers. Those two combined sound to me like R1 will be the last (usable) release for years to come.
Now Herr Dörfler is arguing against this, it should be noted. But it shows that the problem really does exist, and it is not merely a problem for one or two disgruntled users.
There is some archive with BeOS software already available there: https://archive.org/details/2015_BeOS_Collection
Senryu was a good idea before HaikuDepot. It wasn’t meant to fork Haiku code as it was to provide a rich version of Haiku that had apps, wallpaper, media, screensaver, some customizations,etc. It was meant to provide a much better ‘out of the box’ experience than just the plain, skinny, Haiku release.
But HaikuDepot makes it much easier to download apps in short order. If and when HaikuDepot is heavily populated with apps, games, productivity software, wallpaper, screen savers, media, etc, there will actually be less demand for Haikuware software.
As someone who spent a lot of time going through haikuware looking for useful, interesting, and runnable software, I can say that 95% of the items on Haikuware were not useful, not interesting, and/or not runnable. However, that last 5% made up most of the apps that are runnable on Haiku. What we really lost out on was a lot of games that still needed porting to HaikuDepot.
Anyone who wants to read up on the whole debate, not just a cherry-picked paragraph without any context, here’s the whole thread “Beta1 and R1 release plan”.
Regards,
Humdinger
It doesn’t really show me much all, out of context as it is, but anyway I think it’s an error to go over developer’s discussions of far-distant plans with a magnifying glass like that, and take what you see so seriously. While I’m optimistic that we will reach R1, even this is a kind of race against entropy and whatever other destructive forces. Then there will be time to wrangle over what to do next.
Also, that discussion happened on an open and unmoderated mailing lists, where users can (and do) provide valuable input. Where do you get that user suggestions are ignored or somehow not allowed? All development decisions are discussed on the haiku-development list, and everyone can contribute to the discussion, usually resulting in a general agreement. Only when there is an irrecuperable division in two camps, and no decision can be made, we have a vote between the project members (not all of which are developers). I don’t even remember when this happened for the last time, as it is a very rare event.
Wouldnt it be a good sign to give this distro / fork a news entry on the main Site?
I think this could be a good “sign” form our side to Karl ;-).
At least i think it would be the last he expect. Because from what i understand he thinks we are / the haiku devs are ignorant.
And i dont think senryu will take away to much devs from haiku mabye even bring back some devs to haiku / senryu?
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.