Bryan Lunduke has some “from the heart comments / suggestions” on how to improve how Haiku presents itself to the world. It’s from the heart, he is a Haiku advocate, he also has lots of solid points. It’s unfortunate he had a bitter experience trying to find someone to interview a couple of weeks ago, but he’s still a Haiku supporter and gives good feedback. I like his comment that we’re a “hippy commune” 
Please be nice and kind. Bryan is a good guy.
I was watching and came here to see if someone had already shared it. I don’t know him personally, I have just watched some of his videos on open source and so, and I tend to find his opinions and criticisms mostly valid, most of the time, as well as entertaining. He raises some interesting points about the Haiku operating system and its community.
He’s dreaming for the old glory days of OS’s - not for what happens in Open Source projects today. He said there were 4 things that would fix Haiku, but it was hard to make them out:
There are a lot of people who think they know what Haiku needs and keep requesting a single leader.
Meanwhile, there are the people actually working on Haiku who insist this is a terrible idea.
I think the outcome of this is clear: find someone who wants to be the leader, fork the Haiku sources, and see how far that person can take the project before they do a burn out, because it is simply not possible for a single person to be in charge of everything. And I’m sure once there is one single person to attack, the criticism from all the “I know better” people will be directed directly towards the leader, instead of being “shock absorbed” by the project and the community as a whole.
For focus, I don’t know what to say. There are a lot of happy user and a small number of people who say they think the project is beyond hope and very misguided, but keep coming back to it year after year. Personally I think the focus is pretty clear on making an operating system for desktop computers. If there was no focus, we would be seeing a mobile phone version, a server OS, probably a version running on a Linux kernel, and so on; we would see people converting our apps to Qt, making a version of Haiku that run only on command-line with no GUI, and probably a dozen distros. This, somehow, does not happen. How do you explain it if there is no focus? The truth is, making a good desktop OS is a massive job. And within that job, there are hundreds or thousands of tasks to accomplish, and we can afford to let developers pick what they want to work on, depending, not only on what’s most pressingly needed, but also according to their personal skills, motivations, and the time they can spend on the tasks. So, yes, if you look at it only from the perspective of your personal idea of what’s most pressingly needed, well, first of all, not everyone has the same idea, and second, it ignores all other factors. Also: is there any constructive complaints about this? Like, things that we have done and really shouldn’t have because it was a massive waste of time?
Marketing: the OS is in beta phase. It is definitely NOT ready for general users. That makes it a bit difficult to market. You have to target tech enthusiasts, early adopters, and maybe software developers. Which we do, at least here in Europe, by giving talks and attending various opensource conferences and meetups about “alternative computing”. I think the slow growth of the project is OK. We have time to grow slow and steady. There are people who are happy users of Haiku, and, first of all, we can take care of them (and of ourselves). When we have done that, we can see about widening the audience. What would it bring us, anyway? If the goal is to get more users to report more bugs, I don’t see the point. If the idea is to get more contributors to the core OS, I don’t know if “marketing” is the right term, but surely we could do more tech talks and conferences to attract developers. But then, you don’t need to wait for “Haiku” to do that: anyone can submit a talk at a conference. For example, rjzak (who is or was active on this forum) did one at a conference about package management, Leah Hanson (who I don’t think ever contacted the project otherwise?) did one about the Haiku vector icon format. You made or found a cool thing in Haiku? Go share it with other developers! You need some stickers and other promo material for a conference? Ask Haiku inc to fund it, I’m sure they will, and we have the sticker designs ready to print. And if you want to get more involved with this, there is also an endless list of tasks to do: design a flyer (we have one but it’s super outdated), make new sticker designs, handle DVD manufacturing and shipping for the next release, write blogposts and articles about Haiku, and so on. It’s true that there isn’t a lot happening in that area, so, help welcome
Very true. And what´s also interesting to me (not based on hard facts, just my own perception): Many of the first group of people you mentioned also contribute to Haiku in some way, while I rarely see contributions from the members of the second group.
I don’t know what to think about someone who claims to be a long time Haiku supporter and makes nice vids about it. At first glance, I would say like you “It’s cool” and “His opinion is interesting”.
When you look a bit closer, the guy made only two or three posts here, all of them proving that he never read Haiku website. Is he downloading his isos from another site? What he asked on forum has also shown that he’s not able to put his political opinions aside. He probably not spent more than ten minutes total on the forum and didn’t even take time to answer questions back what is somehow ironic.
He clearly disqualified himself making his political opinions public AND mixing them with his job. From that, people approaching him, know that they will be associated with these opinions whatever they are.
Also it’s a weird thing that his opinion changes depending where he posts… Elsewhere we are “angry abrasive confused” “And very much not helpful”.
If you are asking for something to people who are part of a community, it is usually a good idea to not make insulting this community your first move.
IMHO, if you want to tell other people how to handle their hobby, better know how to do your job.
I think that a journalist should have some diplomacy, should listen, should have curiosity, should be objective and not have preconceived opinions.
So make up your own mind about that but, facts are not on his side and I’m a bit puzzled by all this. That guy leaves me a Jekyll and Hyde impression, with that voice in my head crying to stay away.
I don’t know if it’s that, or some people somehow being in a love-hate relationship with the Haiku project. He’s not the only one. Not sure what to make of it, really.
Funding.
Plain and simple.
I’m new here, but I’ll offer the perspective of a former Lunduke fan. I used to enjoy his content quite a lot, but have become increasingly disappointed in the direction he’s chosen to take it. After watching his personal commentary gradually creep in, I’ve reached the conclusion that he’s simply being dishonest.
This goes beyond a simple left-vs-right political disagreement. Much of Mr. Lunduke’s “political” content accuses broad groups of people of being terrorists or child predators, and invites others to harass them. I don’t blame anyone for refusing to associate with this kind of rhetoric, especially someone who is publicly involved with a project like Haiku.
He seems to be requesting that Haiku appoint a leader or a PR department, who will force someone working on the OS to engage with him, against their own best interests. That’s a patently ridiculous thing to ask of an open-source, volunteer-driven project, and if that’s what he wants, he should go interview someone at IBM instead.
Regarding marketing, that doesn’t mean it has to be marketed at general users. I’d say the majority of pepole in the tech space are not aware of Haiku, both users and developers.
I think Serenity is a good case study, as they have been doing a much better job at attracting development resources, both in contributors and financially. They grew primarilly through a YouTube channel where they do coding vlogs and monthly progress reports. A very different approach to YouTube marketing can be seen with MuseScore, who also have been very successful with that. However it has to be said that both are more or less single-leader projects.
In terms of development, Haiku has been doing a pretty good job with the community model (unlike, say, GIMP), but a large factor is probably that for a long time there has been a clearly defined goal with re-implementing BeOS. Recent reviews seem to all agree that Haiku has made a lot of progress in the last few years, and that means a lot of the work is starting to pay off.
I find this interesting as well. Doing those videos generated enough revenue that he is able to work on the OS full time, while also generating enough interest that other people wanted to join in too. It’s quite a neat achievement.
“love-hate relationship” Nail on the head for many.
Re: the lunduke guy : he was probably going to get somebody to talk to him for the interview, but after he started a political discussion here out of nowhere, people decided to run away and avoid him.
Too much of his “suggestions” are kind of “administrative” ones : marketing, leadership, focus, etc. If everybodo that is working into building a house stops work and go around distributing flyers about how nice the house will be, who will build the house ?
Mostly, he could have his own opinions, despite other people liking them or not. Just that he should not ( it´s not polite, to say the least ) try to force them on other people, or bringing them up on every chance/conversation. One doesn´t go to a vegan meeting and start talking about barbecue recipes.
The time Haiku exists proves that the current model works. It´s not so fast, but it is getting things fixed, added and improved. There will always be people that just want to state what they are sure should be fixed, but that won´t put the work to fix things.
I think my point is : the guy has his opinions, and many people do not think they are correct or “good” for Haiku. So, just leave him be. We need not fight with him, nor keep giving him too much attention. Politeness and respect should go both ways.
I’ve just forced myself to listen to the entire podcast, which was quite challenging due to the “I’m soo in love with myself” style of talking he is supposedly famous for.
Most of his arguments have already been commented on, so here’s just a quick point that I think wasn’t addressed so far.
Supposedly “bloat” is slowing down the operating system. If you look at a freshly installed Haiku system, there’s no QT, no GTK, no X emulation layer unless you choose to install them. Nobody forces you to do so. How can something that is not installed slow down the OS?
And there’s of course the politics accusation. I still don’t know what this is based on. He didn’t reply to questions on the forum and I couldn’t find anything on the mailing list or IRC logs. Maybe somebody can shed a light on this one? From my experience the Haiku community is mostly unpolitical and acting otherwise on the forum is actively frowned upon. So I think we’re doing quite well in this regard.
Personally, his attitude of trying to position himself as some kind of saviour for Haiku (as if we needed one) is pretty disgusting. Apart from that, I’m proud to be a small part of a “chaotic hippie commune” like this 
He has a post about it on his “Conservative Nerds” blog, unfortunately behind a $5 paywall. I paid to read the whole thing, hoping that he’d provide some evidence… but he doesn’t. He only says he got this impression from “emails, instant message discussions, and roughly an hour on the phone”, with unnamed Haiku contributors.
Yes, that’s exactly his problem. He asked if any of us Haiku devs would do an interview, we said no because of his right-wing political opinions bordering into conspiracy theories that we don’t want to be associated with. I think the “politics” of this are on his side, not on Haiku’s one.
Also, the “no” replies (or absence of replies) to his interview request was from several individual developers speaking for themselves. So I don’t see how this can really be turned into a “Haiku politics” topic. You can find threads about this on this forum as well as on the mailing list, where he asked about this a few weeks ago.
Asahi Linux is also doing well in that area, I think. If anyone wants to do livestream of their Haiku work, that would be great. Kyle Ambroff did that for a short time (on his Youtube channel “Code Deep Dives”, if I remember correctly). Personally, my time working on Haiku is in parallel with other stuff: chatting on this forum, washing dishes and other chores, listening to music, etc. I spend enough time in calls with colleagues at work during the day, I don’t want to turn my evenings into basically more of that. I will, however, write blogposts when I have something interesting to show (which, unfortunately, is not very often: there isn’t much to say about webkit updates, and, really, they would be pretty boring stream content as well, watching the compiler run for hours, me fixing a few renamed variables or enums, and try again).
Both Serenity and MuseScore have at least one full-time person working for them. And Serenity started from, and I think more or less still is, a videostream about OS development, rather than an OS project that happens to do videostreams (not to disrespect their work: I think it is even harder to do things that way, if anything). We will see how it goes, but it has the consequences that the funding (and, indirectly, what the viewers like) decides where the project goes next. Right now, it seems the attention is mostly on the web browser. Which is cool to see happening, but writing a web engine from scratch is not where I think money in Haiku would better be spent. Is that a compromise we’re willing to make? I don’t know. All it takes is someone willing to do development on stream and using Haiku as a base material.
To my understanding, this was not the case when the projects started their YouTube activity. In case of Muse Score, it started by someone who wasn’t even affiliated with the project at all.
This to me seems less of a product of the funding but more reflecting the previeous experience of the project leader, having worked on both QT and WebKit in the past. That focus was already there before the web browser funding happened. A certain danger of external influence remains of course, that is indeed a valid concern.
As far as videos from the team, I think it’s not just development or porting videos that would help (though that would of course be great). Monthly report videos would be something that even non-developers might be able to contribute, showing off the features from the written blog posts in a video to reach a wider audience. Those seem to be quite popular in the Blender community as well.
Not really, initially Serenity was about writing an OS with an UI that looks like Windows 95 and a core in modern C++ and UNIX-like (I think?), and at some point there were also talks about making a new programming language that would be ABI compatible with C++, but these did not get much traction.
The web browser, on the other hand, received donations that are at least 4x the yearly budget of Haiku.
Let’s look at the last report: Haiku Activity & Contract Report, September 2023 | Haiku Project
Here are things that could make it into a video:
I don’t think any of the other things really lend themselves to a video report. Unless you just want an “audiobook” version, with someone reading the report for you? What else could we make of something like " waddlesplash removed the custom implementations of arch_debug_get_caller and replaced them with a compiler builtin."?
A lot of the work is “under the hood” and not so easy to show in video in this way. Some things do, however, and indeed it would be great to have people doing videos about those when possible.
Haiku needs a former addict who is now a developer to bring in all the “feels” in the form of donations. 
Here’s his blog about it:
I’m not making fun of addicts, my brother is one.
Every dog has its day. Apolitical politics. Yellow journalism.
Ref: About Haiku, Inc. - Haiku, Inc. (haiku-inc.org)
The info is there on the current leader (i.e. President) - even if defined as “the Board”.
Well… the needs and wants of the many. Many OSes are bloated with features not used by many users - but needed by specific users (hopefully, they are donating funds and/or supporting projects).
BeOS compatibility - This is covered in “About Haiku”. There is a realistic limit to OS software and hardware compatibility (this was even mentioned by Be, Inc. with several full-time paid developers/contractors). Neither Apple nor Microsoft provide 100% backward compatibility to previous iterations of their OS product lines.
Roadmap - There is a roadmap for Haiku R1. There is a list of the milestones currently faced by the development team.
Marketing - There is/was a marketing team for Haiku. They were heading up the fundraising effort and merchandising (i.e. memorabilia on Freeware.org). One of the devs covered the current state of affairs in this area.
Haiku devs talk to people at several mentioned meetups and events. This is documented, as well as their marketing attempts. They also promote the yearly hackathons. People interested in open source desktop OSes will discover Haiku - like I discovered it (and probably other people). A decent OS project will get some attention - eventually.
Note: Haiku does have women on the team who are avidly skilled developers. So, the “bunch of boys with their toys” commentary is a bit disingenious…