Like a strategy for the next 5 years:
- make some higher or second post dotation for bugs & new drivers
- make increase the number of developers by half
What your proposse?
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Hello there,
As Haiku isn’t a company but rather an open-source project, we don’t exactly have a plan for the next five years. Haiku developer @PulkoMandy has mentioned the developer team is aiming for a yearly release, and the release this year will be Beta3. We also have some ideas on what future releases, such as R1 and R2 (stable releases) will include, and these do sort of act as a long-term strategy for the project.
I’m not too sure what you mean by this. Could you please clarify?
Since we’re not a company, we can’t just increase the number of developers just with the click of a finger. Our developers are hardworking individuals who put in their time and effort on top of their daytime jobs and responsibilities, and we don’t employ any developers either. Hence, we rely on spreading the word to get new developers to join the project, which is what we are working on doing. Alternatively, we could consider employing our most active contributors, but that is not very feasible at the moment since our finances, whilst enough to pay the project’s expenses, is not nearly enough to pay even one developer full-time (employing developers, for the record, is quite expensive). Hence, I’d advise anyone who wishes to see more developers/development work to either donate to the project here or help out with promotion efforts.
Thanks!
it’s a proposse for increase value of dotations, not only for infrastructure eg. hosting but for Bug Bounty and New Drivers.
Time to turn off your marketing and turn your thinking on
Thanks for the clarification! We don’t want to force people into giving a certain amount, hence the donations form is designed so people can choose how much they wish to give. In terms of bug bounties, the general consensus from the community is that “official” bug bounties will not be held, but if any individuals are willing to do it, they can do it.
That’s not exactly true.
The policy is that bounties are already available at bountysource.com and you can add money to them if you think that is a good way to fund Haiku.The experience from the last 10 years is that one bounty got some money donated to, it did not have any effect, and when a developer finally completed the work needed, they didn’t even claim the money.
So that’s the situation currently. On our side, setting up the infrastructure for bounties is done already. Now it needs more interest from both donators and bounty hunters.
As for the “5 year plan”, there isn’t really such a thing, but I think we can still give some general direction for the years to come. Our way to track this is the Roadmap page: Roadmap – Haiku
Currently the focus is on getting our R1 release out. This is what we have been working for the last 20 years and we have set big goals for ourselves. Until then we will continue publishing beta releases which I personally consider usable for my own needs, but not quite ready as a general usage system (something I would install on my parent’s computer because it just works, or something I would organize and “install party” where anyone can come with their PC and get back home with a nice Haiku install - as is done sometimes for Linux based OS).
So, that’s the focus for now. Fix bugs, add more drivers, keep the OS usable for the people who already run it. Add more software (native or ported). Replace ported software with more native software. Rework and polish the parts of the user interface we are not happy with. You can find all this in the beta3 and R1 milestones in the roadmap.
This is maybe not very exciting times for Haiku, so some of us work on other projects that are a bit more fun to do as well. That includes porting Haiku to new (or “new”) architectures like ARM, sparc, and 68000 CPUs. Thinking about new APIs we could add. Looking into performance improvement and optimizations.
After R1 is out, we expect that there will be many problems left, some already known, some yet to be discovered (or even, some not yet present in the code but that will be added later). So there will be version 1.1, 1.2, etc, improving that situation. This is the R1.1 milestone.
When we are done with all this, the plan is to start work on the second release called R2. This one is considered still to be in some distant future and we have only listed a few ideas of things we definitely want to change, but we also have thousands of other things currently in the “unscheduled” milestones. These may happen earlier than R2, may happen later, or may not happen at all. It all depends on someone deciding to work on it.
As jt15s explained, with developers working on their free time at night and weekend and combining this with a paid job and generally quite busy life, it is not so easy to provide a precise timing for when all of this will happen.
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