In the history of computing usually alliances are the exponential element for the success of a project. Don’t know in pratice if it’s feasible, but Haiku Inc. could consider to try to find a partner, someone selling a machine like the NEOX5, and work together to find the finances to do the work and sell a HaikuBox. I think by having two organizations behind, a kickstarter project could have more possibilities of success by giving to the donors warranties about the successfull ending of the project, the hw supplier on the other hand might have a lot of chances to sell more devices just providing the availability of an HaikuBox if the necessary funds are collected.
I agree some sort of hardware or a very well defined project with a clear goal are key for any sort of successful Haiku Kickstarter. I’ve personally been thinking about it for a while. Like a lot of people involved with Haiku my interest in it waxes and wanes, but I’m sort of getting sick of our seemingly perpetual alpha state. I’d like to actually use it to get real work done, instead of Mac OS X. Maybe having a goal like releasing a HaikuBox with full driver support (and gasp dare I say it: hardware 3D support) would help motivate the developers, or motivate other people to give money to motivate the developers.
Also I’ve been getting more and more interested in design and let’s face it: the Haiku UI looks extremely dated. So I’ve had ideas for a starting a personal long term project for a broad Haiku UI redesign (without abandoning the BeOS heritage.) But there are so many other things of higher importance that I’d almost feel bad doing something seemingly so “trivial”. But I don’t know, seeing how people have gone crazy over the recent Beta changes to the iOS UI (even bad publicity is publicity) makes me think a quality Haiku UI design could get some attention. And if done well it would shut up the people who just look at Haiku and immediately write it off since it looks like an OS from the 90s.
On the topic of hardware, that Minix box looks pretty neat. Unfortunately it is just another example of where Haiku needs to be ported to ARM, and that just doesn’t seem to be making much progress lately. I do think such a form factor is definitely the sort of HaikuBox that I’d like to see, except of course with some BeOS inspired extras, like good ol’ Das Blinkenlights. Also what might be neat for a little box like that is a small battery to make it a little like a laptop, where you could move it from your office to the living room and hook it up to the TV without having to shut it off. The battery also serves as a built-in UPS. Heck you could use a wireless keyboard and mouse and even wireless HDMI and the box could sit on a induction charger so it literally is completely wireless. Hmmm, now I’m getting innovative even outside the context of a Haiku box 
Anyhow, I feel like something needs to be done to spice things up around here.
Focusing on ARM port, and especially Rasbpberry Pi should be 1st priority IMHO. RPi user-base is huge at the moment. We could make a custom cover build for RPi with Haiku Logo at the top, and this might be a Nano HaikuBox for everyone. Its cheap in production and should fit perfectly in actual boom for RPi’s. To do that we dont need to have milions from kickstarter. Of course some amount of money will help a lot.
Some projects already went the Kickstarter route and they have had some success.
In the part of the world that I live in - a good senior programmer should earn about 90-100 K$ (thats about 75K euro) per year. Normal office hours total about 2000 hours per year, so thats something like 37 euro per hour. I am quoting a Salary rate here - not a ‘consultant rate’.
I have nothing but admiration and respect to our Haiku developers who choose to make the sacrifices they do. Taking such low paying contracts, working on Haiku. But those low rates are the reason they simply cannot work them very long.
To really make ‘full time’ development worth their while, we should be paying them the equivalent of consultant rates (maybe 50% higher) of 50-60 euro per hour. Then, and only then, could they work long term for Haiku, and keep their families happy.
While I would love to see a RasPi port and ARM port. I do not believe they are more important then finishing the OS on at least one platform. What good would Haiku do in its current state on these platforms? The web experience would still be pretty bad, there would still be few apps. How about we get a complete OS before we worry about doing a zillion ports??
David
if anything, there would have to be some application. windows was the office (and then gaming) os, mac os for graphic design, linux for servers and power users… each of these has an identity that persists in a wider cultural narrative. there’s a reason beos was called the media os even before it really could be one, and there’s a reason so many development efforts now – from osx to kde – are attempting to reimplement things just now that beos had done in the '90s. considering where production hardware is going right now, it’s a damn fine time to push haiku as the heart of an independent production studio. much of the backend to support it is already there (which is what got me here in the first place), there’s just some polish missing (and i don’t mean the gui).