It took quite a while, and after emailing lots of developers, we finally have someone to take on the Gallium Bounty! Who? The same developer working on Haiku's ATI/AMD driver - Alexander von Gluck (kallisti5). 

Gallium 3D has been part of Mesa since 2009. In August 2011 however, Mesa removed BeOS support . Alexander sent a mail to Mesa's mailing list asking if they'd accept patches from Haiku- this was accepted/confirmed (he even sent the first patch). 

Alexander proposes the bounty be split into payment milestones with the following guidelines:

• 0% * Update Mesa3D / aka Gallium3D to current and work on getting changes accepted in Mesa upstream
• 0% * Get stock Mesa3D into the build system somehow so it is pulled / extracted prior to compiling opengl kit
• 25% * Ensure new Mesa3D based opengl kit works and software rendering occurs (this gets us back to square one with the new Mesa version compiled from upstream.)
• 50% * Get at least one Gallium3D Hardware driver working / rendering.
• 25% * Get two Gallium3D Hardware drivers working / rendering.

The amounts are proportionate to the work. Right now he's about half way through the first item. You can read more details here.

Alexander mentioned that most of the money he'd earn would be used to purchase new ATI/AMD hardware to develop and test the driver he's working on. Unfortunately he has to purchase most of the hardware himself to debug and test the driver. So, by contributing to this bounty, you're essentially helping Haiku on two fronts!

It's good to have a great developer with a track record working on this project; let's wish him luck!

Lastly, I'm going to be retiring the Thank You Award and moving the funds into this bounty. There are a limited number of Haiku developers, and most have received the award. I was happy to administer the program. The project started over four years ago, and yielded 25 awards (and >$1000 in prizes)!