What is stopping you from contributing towards the development of Haiku?

Sorry if the title of this thread seems a little blunt, I don’t mean it to sound harsh. I myself have yet to be able to donate directly, but I do hope to be able to do so in the near future. The point of this thread is to figure out what it would take on Haiku’s side to compel you to donate (or to donate once more if it has been quite some time)?

For me, one factor that is stopping me from donating right this instant is the internet browsing capabilities of Haiku, specifically Web+. Yes, I know it is currently being worked on (and I have to applaud PulkoMandy & others for the tremendous job they have done so far) but there is still quite a ways to go until it is near the likes of Firefox & Chrome. I know some of you may be thinking that if I want Web+ to get to the level of those browsers, why not donate now? I can’t say that I can argue with that logic, but in my eyes the money I choose to donate I view more as a reward for the hard work put in. I guess I’d like to see the results before I decide to part with my money. I’m hoping for those that haven’t donated yet, those that browse this site and this message board anonymously, feel the same way…and decide to donate in droves once the features they deem valuable are implemented in Haiku.

So, for those of you that are registered to this board, what is holding you back?

Maybe Haiku’s unique features would make it more attractive to universities or professions in performing their work, rather than to everyday indivduals. If they become interested in the possibilities of a feature they might contribute code or money, and may even develop some new apps to extend those features. For example:

  • “Replicants dragged to the Desktop.” This feature might be useful to people who need to monitor machinery, processes, or datastreams, like engineers, scientists, meteorologists, stock market workers, and music producers.

  • “Windows stacked, resized, and moved together, or tiled.” This feature could be useful to people who need to work with many documents open at the same time, like authors, playrights, magazine editors, publishers, journalists, and newsreaders (who use laptops now).

  • “Up to 32 virtual workspaces, each with a different background color, image, and screen resolution.” If a piece of art could be made to fill each workspace, this feature could be useful to people who work with displays, like graphic artists, advertisers, and TV and media producers.

  • “Context menus are a quick alternative to digging through window after window.” This feature could be of interest to people who work with data searching, like forensic analysts, and database workers.

" Meta-data - “attributes” - are used for contacts, emails, media library, etc. They can be indexed and then deliver nearly instant search results." This feature could be of interest to librarians, archivists, museum workers, and music and video collectors.

  • And “multi-threading” - where if one application crashes it does not crash the whole OS and require a reboot. This feature could be useful for people who need to control machinery, like robotic engineers (robots, drones), aeronautical engineers (flight simulators, rockets, rovers), car manufacturers (in-car computers), and general manufacturers.

In fact, you could give each feature a unique name relevant to a profession, like “datastrips”, “tiled-reader”, “multidisplayartist”, “forensicologist”, “indexer”, and “robotasker”, and try to “sell” the feature to an interested party to contribute to its development :slight_smile:

With all the work going into webpositive, why not enable Goodsearch as one of the alternate search engines along with google and duck duck go? Some people would not want Goodsearch to be the default search engine (me included) but the option to switch from time to time would be awesome like firefox allows you to select a search engine.

If I had some money I could donate - I would, for sure. I’d probably start donating as soon as I get a job.

There are various ways of contributing to Haiku though. If I had any experience with doing low-level stuff, I’d love to actually work on it and help by writing some useful code.

The only way I can imagine myself contributing to Haiku at this moment would be writing software for it and reporting bugs. I already did some work regarding notification support in Caya, but I guess I need more time and understanding of the APIs to do something serious here.

I personally love Haiku and can’t wait to use it as a main OS on my PC. I’m also doing all I can to spread the word about it. Haiku devs - you’re awesome!

Lack of time. I speak fluent C++, but I can’t make the time to build Haiku and start fixing bugs. I maybe find the time to download and run a nightly build once in two weeks.

Not knowing any C/C++/C#.

As for donations: I’ve no cash to spare. But this system’s UI is better than anything else I’ve ever seen.

[quote=icekhaos]Not knowing any C/C++/C#.
[/quote]

If you have time to spare, then you could try testing open source Haiku apps to help out by installing HaikuPorter.

From inside haiku terminal:

git clone https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuports.git
git clone https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuporter.git
ln -s /boot/home/haikuporter/haikuporter /boot/home/config/non-packaged/bin/
haikuporter album

This will install haikuporter and will auto compile and build the the photo manager app “Album”.

Then if you find any bugs or think of a new feature, you can add it to their bug tracker:

If you know Python, then you can help out with haikuporter itself.

I can’t code and don’t have much money and I don’t do any shopping online, if Haiku had some donation cards with a code to type in or some thing then I would buy one.

At present I have been donating a small but regular monthly amount of US$30. If I could spend more time with the Haiku OS booted instead of Linux, I would be testing more and reporting more bugs. The reason I have Linux booted more is mainly because of boinc and running varous grid computing projects contributing to medical research and solar energy research. More hours/day I run them the more I contribute and the more points I get. I would be booted into Haiku more, if there was a boinc port that could handle the projects I have running.

[quote=richienyhus]

If you have time to spare, then you could try testing open source Haiku apps to help out by installing HaikuPorter.

This will install haikuporter and will auto compile and build the the photo manager app “Album”.

Then if you find any bugs or think of a new feature, you can add it to their bug tracker:

If you know Python, then you can help out with haikuporter itself.[/quote]

I’d love to help out in any way I can in my spare time. Does it matter which nightly I’m running? Currently I have a x86 GCC 4 hybrid VM (no particular reason, I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about with gcc4). I plan on actually installing Haiku in a partition on my HP Mini 311 netbook sometime this week, so I’d like to install the nightly that will help you guys out the most.

Great, Kulluminatii! It’s best to get the newest official nightly image, i.e. gcc2 hybrid.

Another small way to help out financially: Use GoodSearch a few times a day and make Haiku the benefactor. Apparently about 1800 people gave it at least a try once, though I suspect most didn’t stay with it… Anyway, it’s just a penny a search, but if those 1800 could keep up 3 searches a day, we’d have almost $20k by the end of the year…

Regards,
Humdinger

Thank you Humdinger, I’ll download the latest nightly later on this week and get to it! And yes, I’ve been using it for some time on my main laptop, netbook, and have assigned it to the computers in my home. I’ve only been able to gather ~$27 on my main computer, but every bit helps. I’m guessing some of those 1800 people are users like me who have installed GoodSearch on all the computers in their home, which may have inflated the numbers a bit. Hopefully sometime this year Haiku goes into Beta and attracts a whole slew of new users, which will make GoodSearch much more effective and should increase the likelihood of reaching $20k.

Right now I’m chipping in $20 a month (started after the recent drive) but what’ stopping me from contributing code-wise is simply time. I’ve had a tinker here and there over the years and tried to get stuck in, but the killers for me have always been a fundamental lack of knowledge regarding the FS layout and the build tools.

Personally me the stopper is the overall state of the project. In is completely unfriendly for newcomers. As a developers who have already registered on this site near 8 years ago I want to say following:

  1. As the project is marginal is attracts marginal non-professional persons. Of course it is driven by well skilled developers but is is also known that there are some guys who have vote without meritocracy rights to do that. They are just allowed because of marginality of the project. Normally when everything fine usually such people are not allowed to decide what to do. Summary: the meritocracy is not yet reached in Haiku.

  2. Second, as a result of first is the development process. Not using GitHub and other social developing basegrounds is totally fail for the project that reduces fun. Attaching patches through web Trac into SVN repository, or even attach patches by email in legacy mailing list kill the fun totally. Summary: please make a development fun not pain.

  3. And of course morons in board of directors. I will be concrete and not spare to the whole Haiku, Inc. cause maybe those guys are ok ingeneral. E.g. it is normal for Urias McCullough to call me an psychotic in private chan and depublish my public letter which I hope to see not only developers in mailing list but also a Haiku users about application announcement. I’m not making money on that application, this is not an commercial, but I was banned like I submitting to Apple Store or Windows Store :slight_smile: Summary: please remove your dicks from board of Haiku, Inc. I don’t know how much he does to Haiku, Inc. and the weight of this contribution. But I believe I will be happy without his contribution work.

  4. No chances to influence on process. Even bright thoughts are being rejects starting from the discussion. “We don’t need it”, “here is workaround”, any help community tried to provide was rejected on early stages, and I’m talking not about myself, but about other Haiku contributors. Let us remember how long KeymapSwitcher was not included into Image. Also gaps in package management that blocks Haiku update procedure was rejected as unnecessary, despite positive vote in Trac by all developers. Everything said that tools used in process are not working and overall process is broken.

I personally stop donating Haiku project my money and time.
My attempt to contribution was failed and now I will just wait until something changed.
I’m already here for a long time so I have enough patience.
I was trying to be constructive in my remarks about Haiku process,
hope someone in Haiku with cold mind will meditate on it :slight_smile:

If you’re going to continually smear me, you might as well tell the whole story instead of twisting the events and words. Let me reiterate what I said in your article’s comments:

Let me iterate what occurred so my words are no longer twisted: You privately contacted me on IRC and asked if I could publish your article, because I was a member of Haiku, Inc. At this point, I explained several things to you:

  1. I don’t know if we have a policy for publishing articles for community members, and I asked if you could maybe started a thread on the haiku-web mailing list to find out what our policy was.

  2. I told you I could (and did) publish the article anyway.

  3. I told you that Haiku, Inc. really had no specific control over the website.

Just because I am a board member for Haiku, Inc. (something I volunteered for many years ago, I might add), doesn’t mean I am not also a Haiku project contributor. In fact, I was a haiku-os.org website admin before I was ever a Haiku, Inc. member.

I do not regularly keep up with our policies for granting access to other project members to create/edit content on the website, so I was hoping you might ask on the mailing list to find out what the policy was (since it was your article, and you clearly wanted it published).

Now that I have asked you to please not use your article’s comments to attack other people and their abilities, and suggested that I regret having published the article, you seem intent on attacking me.

I have no problem saying what I said to you privately in public - your behavior is very psychotic - you went on a tirade in IRC, privately messaging me unsolicited and attacking me directly after I tried to be reasonable about it. I’d be glad to post that publicly, I’m not ashamed.

Do what you want. If the project wanted me to leave, I’d go peacefully - but you are the first person in a LONG time to even suggest such a thing.

Well, maxim. Maybe you’ve coded a great application, I haven’t tested it but it sounded pretty awesome. But on the other hand, instead of using it to make Haiku better, you’ve chosen to make a direct attack on Caya (which I’m a contributor by the way).

I’m not surprised your article was taken down. Another thing is, you haven’t even got any reasonable arguments, it was more like “caya suckz!!!11111” inventing random fake data as an explanation

I think you should get your shit together, you know?

@ maxim:
My experience is completely contrary to what you state. Considering the rudeness and arrogance with which you attack the project and one of the most deserving non-coding members, I tend to think the problem is more on your side.
I do agree that the handling of patches in Trac is far from perfect. There are discussions on it on the dev mailinglist every once in a while. The developers are aware of it, but apparently the solution hasn’t been found yet.

@ all:
Please don’t post angry, you’ll feel stupid in the morning…

Regards,
Humdinger

Web+ now respects the “Search page” setting in it’s settings. You can put “http://goodsearch.com/search-web?keywords=%s” in there to start searching/donating via Goodsearch. “https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s” would be DuckDuckGo.
Basically, you do a test search with your search engine and replace the search string with “%s”.

Would be nice to have them easily changeable from a pop-up menu. I’m sure that’ll come, just as a browsing button to open a file dialog to insert a path for the download folder etc. Patches welcome, I’m sure. :slight_smile:

Regards,
Humdinger

Well, first of all I want to thanks all people contributing code, money and other efforts to Haiku. It’s a great Os to use, and a great project to work with.

Yes, we have some problems with getting newcomers involved. Our workflow is clearly suboptimal. But, Maxim, I spent hours on IRC explaining you why we ended up doing things this way, and I still believe the resons are valid:

We had problems with berlios, our previous code hosting service, and we don’t want this to happen again. Had we chosen to continue using a 3rd-party forge at the time, we would probably have gone with Google Code Project Hosting. By now, that’s mostly a dead-end and we would have to migrate to github again. In a few years, github will lose momentum and maybe we’ll have to go with something else. On the other hand, providing our own server is the safer and most future proof solution.

We explained you over IRC that no, you DON’T need to attach your patch to Trac. You can commit your work on a github branch, and put a link to that on Trac. This way, we can work with people that use github (we even have a mirror of our code there), but also with people not using it, and hosting their own git repo, or using bitbucket, or gitorious, or nothing at all and sending patches. If you’re not willing to listen to something as simple as this (and you endup ragequitting IRC or something), there’s no way anyone is going to take you seriously.

It still seems very unclear to you how the project works: Haiku, Inc. has absolutely no decision power over Haiku. The only thing they can do is pay the bills, and decide wether they want to hire coders to get some code written. So far, no one outside of the developers already having commit access asked for a contract, but should that happen, they could consider it as well. On the project side, there is a known list of people which are considered part of the project. These get commit access, and a vote right when a decision is needed (the votes happen publicly, on the haiku-development mailing list). One thing we vote for is allowing more people to enter the project. We have very high quality standards, maybe too high, because this list of people is what defines the so-called “Haiku way”. This is made of things like coding style guidelines, attitude towards problem solving (don’t hide the bug, hunt it and squash it), and the general idea of what the system should look like. You seem to understand at least part of this, as you have worked hard to make Haiku Chat match the guidelines and some of the Haiku Way.

As this team of developers get bigger, there are a few unwanted consequences. From the outside, it looks like things are really slow. When you ask them something, it may require a lot of discussion to try to get everyone to agree. If that doesn’t work, we resort to a vote. Then we get the results back to you. The process at Haiku, Inc. is similar. You have to also remember (almost) all these people are working on their free time, and in different timezones, making communication even more difficult.

Finally, we currently don’t really have someone in charge of the website. The situation on this side is really unclear, and yes, this is something we should improve. We have heard your complaints, and I don’t think the general answer was initially “we don’t care”, but more like “we know there’s a problem, but either we don’t have a solution yet, or we have designed one, but didn’t get it running”. We considered using Gerrit as a way to review and approve patches, for example. This would be a very good tool given our workflow, allowing the people with commit access to review patches there, add comments, and approve or reject them. This works well in other projects and has a good integration with git, making it easy to work with. Yet, we don’t have people with enough free time and competences to set this up, and it’s been on the TODO list for months.

Instead of getting angry at how wrong we’re doing things, one way you can contribute is halping with some of these non-development tasks. Editing content for the website is a way to do that. Answering posts on this forum is another. People even became part of the project like this, for example Diver does an excellent work of reviewing tickets, testing apps and finding many bugs, and doing mockups of how the UI could be improved. This is very appreciated by everyone and he is now a project member, including commit access even if he uses that very rarely.

So, the first step in being part of the project is to learn how to interact with others, and try to understand why things are the way they are, and try to improve them yourself where you can. That’s the best you can do if you still want to help Haiku.

Бей “негров” из Haiku Inc! Какое-то педолобби собрали там…