A 'Thank You' award was established in the summer, and has been available under the 'Thank You' tab in the bounty section of our website.

The purpose of the project is to offer a small financial reward ($50 USD) every two months to an individual, group, or organization that has furthered and been of extraordinary service to the Haiku/BeOS community thereby offering community recognition and appreciation of their services. A board was setup to nominate those who are thought to fulfill these duties and a public poll to decide the outcome. It's meant to be a fun and easy-going project. Incidentally, the pool of the project only holds enough to offer two awards, please consider donating to the project to see it continue.

We now present the nominees:

Jorge G. Mare (aka koki):

Koki has been hard at work the last couple of months, first organizing and promoting Haiku through Faltercon, and now designing and distributing artwork for Haiku on his website 'MyHaiku '.  

Axel Dörfler (aka axeld):

For work on every aspect of Haiku - from low level kernel stuff to the Sudoku game. Axel has been a major contributor to Haiku for many years. It was Axel who first forked the NewOS kernel and much of the latest network stack was started by him. The OpenBFS filesystem was almost entirely written by Axel. Most recently he has been working on improvements to the VM.

Ingo Weinhold (aka bonefish):

Ingo is the resident Haiku build system guru. It is thanks to Ingo that it is easy to build Haiku under platforms as diverse as BeOS R5, Linux and FreeBSD. Ingo has also contributed lots of code to Haiku and provided help and support to new contributors. The private layout API (for making font-sensitive UIs) is his work, as is the disk device manager which will enable partition management under Haiku. Finally he has been involved in the latest round of VM stability improvements with Axel.

Stephan Aßmus (aka stippi):

Before Haiku Stephan was best known for Wonderbrush, the slick graphics editor. He brought his graphics experience to Haiku and quickly became the resident expert on the app_server. In recent months the app_server has seen bug fixes and speed-ups. Stephan is also a talented graphic artist and most of the beautiful new Haiku icons were designed by him. Stephan also regularly offers advice and support to new contributors on the mailing list.

Greg Nichols & Sean Herber (BeBits):

What would the BeOS/Haiku community be without the 8 plus years of uninterrupted service brought to us by the good folks at Bebits? Their wonderfully designed website is a pleasure to use. I bet many of us see the 'BeTips Jar' but never contribute, now could be a good time to show your support.

So, please vote now (closed now) for who you consider the best candidate for our first award (poll closes October 1st 12 p.m EST)!