Most of you probably know about kickstarter by now , and if you don’t , it’s basically a micro funding site. Lately there have been quite the few successful projects , projects that managed to obtain insane amount of funding.
As Haiku In.c is an US based entity maybe it’s time for a funding campaign on Kickstarter.
Haiku is quite well looked upon on must tech sites so most likely such a campaign would be well covered in the news bringing the project into everyone attention. And as we have seen till now people are quite eager to invest into something new and different.
Even if the campaign doesn’t rack much in funds it should at least bring Haiku in the attention of more people.
Also , most likely , we will receive more then from the current on site Fundraiser.
What is the community opinion on such an endeavor?
It sounds like a fine idea. I see two possible issues:
Who would work on it? Haiku doesn’t have a team of professional software developers. Instead, it’s a relatively small group of people, each having other professions, that spend some free time working on Haiku. If a kickstarter project were to meet its monetary goal, would there be a developer willing and available to work on it? Would there be more than one?
What would the kickstarter project be for specifically? I assume people wouldn’t contribute to a goal of “Finish the Haiku operating system”, or “Fix all of the Haiku bugs”. It would need to be something that a specific developer is knowledgable about, and the developer needs to have the time and willingness to work on it. Which tasks are available that meet those requirements?
Let’s see what it happens if someone, who has XP in marketing, do a Haiku promotional video for kickstarter.
sure Haiku Inc. could hire a couple of more Devs if enough money is raised.
Well if you have a bigger goal you can get more money… and if a Haiku kickstarter got into the hundreds of thousands as many have it many developers could work on it full time. Kickstarter is also a bit higher profile than just a donation button on the haiku site as people that didn’t know about haiku before will donate just for a good cause.
That said… Haiku would need a “sales pitch” video made by the developers. Possibly similar to the old BeOS videos.
It might also be a good idea to target specific hardware…
Haiku is too broad a subject for kickstarter. However, you could start a kickstarter for a specific piece of Haiku you’d like to have funded and built, similar to bounties. For instance you could make a kickstarter for the Intel HDA driver or for the compositing app server. Ultimately funding is one part of the equation, you need smart, talented, and dedicated developers willing to work on such a project first – only then could you create a kickstarter.
Maybe focus on the Atom netbooks as the targeted Hardware. These devices are incredibly , horrifically slow with any Os you load , be it Linux or Windows. The sale pitch could be made towards the millions of frustrated netbook user. Promise something along the lines of fixing all the bugs for this platform ( which shouldn’t be that hard considering Haiku runs crazy well on Atom boards ) plus a fully working Webpositive and proper media playback ( I managed to play HD video on an Atom netbook , something no other Os can claim it can do ).
And as you said a video would make a very striking impression on people , they probably won’t believe how fast and smooth the hole experience is.
the last time, i think 1 year was offered to michael, and with the option to enlarge the contract depending on the donations.
I think one should really make a poll somewhere, or simply ask the main haiku developers, under what conditions they would start working for haiku full-time under contract. I have a little suspicion, that even even haiku inc would offer contracts for 3 years or 5 years, most of them would still not accept.
If you can pay them well enough they would accept. If a kickstarter campaign raises enough money , you would even have the option of just hiring an outside developer or developers to work for Haiku Inc.
well, haiku inc offered about 2.000 euro a month. That’s anything but bad. In normal case even the game developers (except perhpas the leader) don’t get more than 2.000 - 3.000 a month.
Most engineers dont get a month more than 2.000-3.000 in normal case.
And you have also the advantage that you dont have in fact a real boss, you can manage your time how you want, you can work wherever you want, and work on stuff that you like. For example you could move to an tropical island, and work from there on haiku.
So, what do you understand under “pay them well enough” ? Where is the limit? (I mean, of course if you offer let’s say 1 million euro a month, of course you will find somebody).
so the solution is just, to ask haiku developers, and see under what conditions they would work fulltime for haiku inc.
Or in the worse case there is the option to hire from outside the community if , by what you say , 2000 a month is a great salary. If we get something like 48 000 we can contract a software engineer to work full time on Haiku for 2 years. In the current economic condition there won’t be a lack of possible employees.
I knew some linux devs that were basically willing to work on anything for around 60 an hour.
it makes no sense to start dreaming and speculating, what you be if haiku had more money.
the most straight forward thing would be to go and ask on the mailing list the haiku developers under what conditions they would start working on haiku fulltime.
I think you would be disappointed about the response.
And taking an external developer is a little dangerous, since for example he will not know haiku and learning how it works, could take a lot of time.
Perhaps working on a single component (e.g. graphics drivers) could be done also by an external dev. but i doubt that you will find anybody.
Try to post on article on osnews.com like: Offering 2.000 euro for fulltime dev, for writing code for Haiku, and then see how many people are interested.
Look at the package management. Even haiku inc has enough money to pay for continuing the work on package management, nobody wants to (or has something else to do).
There are a lot of other smaller hobby os’s than haiku, which have a lot less money, and they are also dreaming, how much progress they could make if they had the money of haiku inc.
If there is no money, people are inclined to think: yes we dont make much progress because we dont have money to pay for developers. But once you have the money, you have to notice, that just the money is not enough.
I really feel sorry for karl (haikuware.com) , who donated a lot of money (i think all together about 10.000 - 20.000 or even more) and in the end, there is nobody willing to work for it.
How about starting a Kickstart to make Haiku box? small computer with arm/intel ivy bridge/whatever CPU and stuff. i suppose that could done. Look at the OUYA project they did quite fine. just think this as a possibility to get Haiku more attention and truly be able make the Haiku evolve with its hardware. Sincce Haiku is open source there is no restriction.
but if you took a look at “ouya” you would understand that haiku can not do the same.
First haiku is not ported (and perhaps will not be ported for a long time) to arm. Second we dont have hw-acceleration, and haiku has just a few applications. And haiku at the moment is unfriendly for game development.
it has not much sense to dream with the eyes opened.
Well, the bigger problem I think with a HaikuBox kickstarter is that there isn’t anyone willing to make a HaikuBox.
The developers of OUYA want to design a piece of hardware, market it, build it, sell it, and distribute it. However, the developers of Haiku are just a random handful of people that want to work on an open source operating system.
I find cipri’s comments about just how much money Haiku has already collected in donations to be fascinating! Even though the money hasn’t been used yet, I think Haiku is progressing at a nice rate. I only wish package management was finished. That would make updating nightly builds and releasing my own Haiku software that much easier.
Just to clarify: Almost all of the donations up to now have been used for development, see the Funded Development page at Haiku Inc. What’s currently in the warchest is just enough to finance the next two contracts that have been proposed for the end of the year. With a bit of luck we’ll have a working package manager this time next year, bringing us very close to beta and then R1.
Thanks for the link. I just read there on the mailing list, and it’s fabulos, and unexpected, that both oliver and ingo want to work both at about the same time, and both about 2 month.
This is just great, and it will be a great surprize for many people when haiku inc. will make the decision officially.
I wanted to comment a bit about the negativity in this thread about Haiku developers and contracts:
Just to clarify the numbers, Oliver and Ingo are proposing to work 160 hours for 2000 EUR. That divides into 12.50 EUR per hour. That is a very small hourly rate for a software contractor. I currently earn more than 6 times that per hour for my Ruby on Rails contract work in the US.
So it is really quite a sacrifice for them financially to take these contracts. Yes, they are working on Haiku, which they like to work on. Yes, they are getting paid to do that, while other Haiku volunteer developers are not. But they are just getting enough money to pay the bills, and are earning quite a bit less than they could doing other work.
So it should not be surprising that there aren’t more Haiku developers clamoring to do this.
Nonetheless those of us who work on Haiku in our spare time do what we can in the time we can spend.
As for the whole topic of this thread: I certainly have been thinking about Kickstarter lately, but I think the most viable Haiku-related project for that would be hardware, some sort of HaikuBox. Of course if enough funds were raised a big side effect of such a project would be Haiku getting more quickly brought to R1. Of course there is no guarantee such a project would receive much support on Kickstarter. It would have to be very well done and well marketed, and I do think it is possible, but maybe not until Haiku is further along.
