I'm pleased to announced a developer applied for our Gallium Bounty. Adrian Marius Popa (mariuz) is a Linux programmer/system admin/open source advocate & developer who was inspired by Krzysztof Smiechowicz's recent completion of the Gallium Bounty on AROS - thereby believing the same can be done for Haiku (incidentaly, double as much money is available for this bounty, but we encourage additional contributions). Adrian develops for Ubuntu, and is on his way to becoming a full MOTU. You can read more about him here.

Adrian plans to develop a Linux compatibility layer and estimates completion to be about a year, with something rock solid in two years. His comments:

"The hardware gallium3d situation is pretty messy (the software part can be solved and i think is already used by Senyru) whithout drm/kms/gem/ttm(memory manager) there will be no hardware acceleration, all the current drivers (Linux ones) need that api. Look at the BSD world they have the same issue (their foundation is seeking someone to write the same kernel modules). 

So in the end, that is what needs to be implemented to support modern drivers. I will take this way with a Linux compatibility layer that will allow compile+loading Nouveau, Radeon, Intel open source drivers (the common drivers supported by Linux/X by default without propietary bits)."

Adrian will keep us up to date with his progress on our blog, and the Haiku mailing list. We're pleased to welcome Adrian to Haiku and our bounty program. Best of success! 

In other bounty news, I don't know anymore how many developers I emailed to try to finish the Wifi Encryption bounty (it was a lot). In the end, it will remain 2/3 complete until someone has the time to implement Wifi Encryption properly.

I did have interest in the TV bounty, but after a few emails and a promised proposal with a deadline never materialized, the TV bounty will expire.

Lastly. anyone who contributed to the Wifi Bounty and would like a refund, will get a 33% refund (first come, first served), TV bounty donors will get the full refund but this must be done by contacting me within a week. The ~$2300 (less refunds) will be pooled together. I'll hold a poll next week to decide what should be done with the money. My only current suggestion is, donate the money to Haiku Inc. to be used for a work contract of their choice. Please leave comments for alternative suggestions.