Outside the core team of awesome coders trying to get to the finish line to deliver Haiku R1, where can folks help out to help the project achieve getting to the R1 milestone? And before you point to the general list to areas, I wanted to get a feel from folks actively working on the haiku project in various capacities.
Applications applications applications applications applications applications
Money money money money money money
bug fix bug fix bug fix bug fix
thats it
A lot of help is needed in many areas. The core team is quite small and we need more help!
The bug tracker has a huge list of things that need to be done. Or you can write applications (or just take some from HaikuArchive and start improving them). You can also help by testing Haiku on all the (PC compatible) hardware you can find around you, and report anything that doesn't work as expected. You can contribute to the user guide, its translations in various languages, and localization of the OS itself. You can just join the IRC channel and mailing list and help other users there fixing their problems. You can advertise Haiku to your local (or online) open source or computer geek communities in an attempt to bring us more developers and let them know that no, Haiku isn't dead.
Finally, if you lack time to do any of these, you can donate some money to Haiku, inc, which will be (hopefully) wisely spent.
[quote=PulkoMandy]
Finally, if you lack time to do any of these, you can donate some money to Haiku, inc, which will be (hopefully) wisely spent.[/quote]
That’s very hard to believe though, isn’t it? Haiku Inc. hasn’t managed to publish its skeleton “Financial Report” for many years now, and even the skimpier forward-looking “budget” document quietly ceased years ago, leaving just the sporadically updated “donation indicator” graphic and empty promises.
About a year ago Haiku Inc got “new blood” replacing long dormant directors with new people who… made no visible difference to the corporation’s drift into oblivion.
I think a good one would be installing step by step, apps from Haiku Depot (from different repositorys) test these installed apps and give feedback wich are broken … :).
It’s easy to follow from the Haiku inc mailing list. The money is spent on:
- The server where this website, the development tools, and the package repositories are stored (~900€ per year according to haiku inc webpage).
- Travel and food fees for people attending various open source conference and advertising Haiku there.
- Funded development, currently on the media kit and streaming support.
The “Getting Involved” section of the website has pretty in depth coverage of all the diffrent ways that people can help Haiku.
Quick links:
The biggest problem now is the usability of the programs available for Haiku.
The second problem is to keep track of the software problems…
The way from Download, test, and report of the gathered experiences … is not well maintained or protocoled… so many informations get lost very easy.
Which program is working or in other words is going to made work with little effort?
I use Moho 2.5 a animation program… written for BeOs… it is working very well… but you are not able to render your animations… the program itself is working!
For show the gaming possibilities in Haiku one can use Quake 2… it is working very well too, but! there we have sound problems!
For learning programming one can use Paladin… but it is not compiling out of the box with the required standard libs… one has to know hot to adjust Paladin to make it work with common C++ tutorials found on the web… that makes Haiku for beginners frustrating and there is no positive first impression!
If you are trying to show the capabilities of Haiku you can use the inbuilt BeScreenCapture for capturing the screen/desktop… problem here is: the output is playing just to fast! so you cannot share/show your workflow or experience with Haiku to others!
MediaConverter is installed by default by Haiku… but it doesn’t do its job as expected! There are problems with ffmpeg as I understand or not understand… you cannot convert movies as you could with BeOs…
Firewire is not working as I know and tested… but it is making problems with the media addon server… so I disabled it permanently to get rid of sound problems caused by the firewire implementation (irritation)…
Blender is a fine program which was working once with BeOs… last stable version was 2.11!
Because of the changed Haiku API most of the program is not working now… only the shortcuts are working very well.
So… how to be productive with Haiku as a common user?!
Do not misunderstand me… The Haiku system itself is very stable and in lots of parts better than BeOs was…
but how to get productive with Haiku right now?
I think job one, should be to test functionality of all included applications, file bug reports and get any applications still using the old co-ordinate windowing system update to the auckland layout implementation.
but none of that prevents Beta 1 IMHO, and much of this will begin to happen if Beta 1 ever gets going.
I think most of the money is being spent wisely. If you look at the contracts that have been let, most of the money does go to development.
I think you can specifically target donation monies now to a specific goal. Is that correct?
No, when donating to Haiku, inc you can’t target your money to a specific goal. They accepted one such donation once, but the project didn’t happen in the end and they decided to reuse the money for something else. The other option would be refunding the donator, which is a lot of paperwork.
If you want your money to be spent in something specific, you are better off hiring a developer directly, or if you don't have enough money for that, start a crowdfunding campaign or use some "bounty" system.