I know for a fact BeOS was the BEST operating system in existence for the masses in its time, period. I also know the main reason for its demise was not so much financial mismanagement but the bullying and powerful tactics of a certain popular OS institution which helped destroyed BeOS.
I give the developers and passionate helpers of Haiku all credit for continuing this labour of love and if there’s anything I can help with in any way you have my services.
Regards
Good to hear you enjoyed using BeOS back in the day. I think it was clearly a Better operating system than Windows ME and the Linuxes of the day. Plus it looked better than Mac OS 9.
There are a Few ways you can help Haiku.
If you have high to expert coding skills then you could just check Haiku’s bug tracker to see if anything takes your fancy. Otherwise you could have a look at some the bugs that there is not enough hands on deck to fix here.
If you have mid level coding skills you could try get the abiword port compiling on Haiku again or do the same with the Eventual Personal time manager app.
If you have low level coding skills you could try port your favourite SDL, PyGame or allegro game to Haiku. You could also check out Haiku’s tasks that have been marked as easy on the bug tracker. Check out these porting tips!
If you only have began to code or are willing to learn one or two things then you could create some .bep files, Haiku uses these to fetch, patch, build and install a software packages. A guide to writing them can be found here, plus some open source BeOS software that need .bep files but don’t need porting can be found here.
If you speak another language or even a local version on English, then you can help with the Haiku interface translation.
If you are good at artistic endeavours then you could try creating system sounds,missing icons, graphic design for posters and t-shirts, marketing material for tech shows and documentation if you are good at writing.
If you are good at website development or maintenance, then Haiku also needs help there.
You could also help out by testing Haiku and submitting tickets for any bugs you find on dev.haiku-os.org.