Haikuware News & Blogs
Spread your news, software reviews, comments, & ideas about Haiku!
mmlr's Coding Frenzy
- Ported the TTY module so Haiku now has a working USB serial device
- Added support for tablet devices to Haiku
- Added support for joysticks to Haiku
- Fixed an obscure bug that prevented a lot of AMD motherboards from working
- Enabled IO-APIC which led to proper PCI routing and fixed a huge amount of hardware problems and open tickets.
Anything else? Since about the middle of March he's made around 150 commits to Haiku in several areas!
These were high quality commits that brought Haiku on the fast track. For this reason, I think it's a good idea to reward Michael for his hard work. He has won our TYA before, but I think the cirumstances are extraordinary. I know a lot of people are very greatful their hardware now works or they can now boot Haiku thanks to Michael.
The TYA fund has a surplus. A while ago, someone personally donated $120 to me for maintaining the website; I put this directly in the TYA. So, I think it would be suitable to take $350 from the TYA, and award it to Michael. That would still leave us with a year's worth of regular TYA funds. With the $350, Michael should be able to reward himself with a decent netbook, or anything else to his liking!
Comments
Maybe have a award for the highest number of commits/ticket resolutions next month ?
I guess that could be an idea, but you must take in account that commit is not equal commit. It's possible that one commit of somebody is more worth than 100 commtis of somebody else.
The same holds for tickets solved.
The idea, to give money to people who do a lot of work is a very good idea. And I respect karl a lot that he got that idea.
Another idea could be, that every developers has a paypal account (or something like that), and that accounts are somewhere on main site visible so that everybody can easily donate money to a specific developer.
I did take this into account. There were easily 10 of his 160 recent commits that were individually worth 100 commits!
Well, maybe grouping up tickets and putting small bountys on the tickets and awards for solving the biggest nusance ones might be a then viable option. It would require someone who knew how hard each ticket was to resolve however to group them up.
But maybe paying by the commit/resolution might get the thing done. Not to mention maybe its a viable way to add funding to Haiku.
Want a feature or a bug fixed, get a couple of guys together and put a bounty/award on it.
Just trying to think of some fun and easy ways to get the devs motiviated, although lately they are very motivated looking at the commit log. Its up nearly 2000 commits in the last 60 days.
BTW who says it has to be money, since it never seems to motivate those guys anyways, could be gift certificates to a fine dinner for the family, DVDs, a giant statue made out of CPU's etc.
In fact the more exotic the award, maybe the more motivated the group ?
If I had another 350$, Ingo would most likely be next.
transferred the funds. hopefully we'll see Haiku on the Samsung Galaxy
Maybe a ticket fund raising drive is in order then ?
That is dispointing to here. Maybe the devs, since its a hobby and they are somewhat competitive, just need some kind of "coder of the month" trophy. Where every month or quarter the most active developer get this novel trophy as a reward for being the most productive.
The trophy would need to be someting unqiue to and very distinctive.but it would be a capture the flag type affair, where the guy who wins keeps the trophy until the next vote and if he wins, he keeps it and if he loses it goes to the next winner. so the trophy would have to be something special and unqiue.
Hard to say what motivates these guys but it could just be good fun to !
Let the users and devs all vote on the issue to.givest the devs 3 votes per 1 user vote. Could be interesting ! Especially in a capture the flag scenario.
I suspect this would have a level of redundancy attached, as there are several core developers who actively contribute the most code consistently....
As with a lot of FOSS projects, a lot of the core/long time developers aren't motivated by financial gain. If they were, they probably wouldn't be there in the first place.
One thing I had envisioned, is trying to bring on commercial vendors or manufacturers to donate items for awards. Hardware that would be useful to Haiku's developers. In return, I would write a good news article about the company/product & reward, and post the respective company as a contributor/supporter to Haiku in our Thank You Award. Haikuware is already deeply engrained in search engines, and gets some good traffic :) It would really be in a laptop/camera/printer, etc. manufacturer's best interest to do this. Naturally, if I saw that x manufacturer/vendor supported Haiku, I would consider buying their products - It's cheap advertisement.
If anyone would help with this, that'd be great (i.e posting a draft letter in our forums, and searching for corporate relations emails of big companies)! Otherwise, I'd be happy to support your ideas/projects (i.e Sean), as long as I'm not doing all the leg work!
P.S - how's the application compatibility list/review article coming along? I hear A3 will be released soon & that AndrewZ has been in contact with you about the applications... :)
Well I think I got most of the popular apps on haikuware. When stuff had no downloads or less then 25 total in like a year or 2. I pretty much didn't bother.A full audit would be easier if I didn't have to deal with the web interface to find the applications. Thats a big time consumer for me.
Pulkomandy has me auditing a huge repository and theres a surprising number of applications.
To adress your ideas about getting some vendor support. I have some ideas on how to do this. Let me talk with a few people in my industry and see how they have gotten this to work for them, and I will see if a similar tactic could be brought to use here. I think something has to be done, to either bring in more devs, or get these guys a funding system which gives them the flexibility to continue or go full time.
I was thinking maybe its getting close to time to contact a OEM like DELL, HP etc to get a small corporate sponsorship. Enough to cover reasonably salarys for the term of 2-3 years to finish the os and develope some applications. I think if my math is correct, it looks like haiku would about 3.5 million dollars per year to finish figuring paying the top 18-20 commiters roughly 60-70K USA dollars per year. Although given the proximity of a finish line if the devs where full time and given that many applications could likely be easily cloned or updated, it might not take more then 18 months.Plus Dell is seriously trying to work with linux and they are having tremendous trouble with it. Just lots of BS problems, Lot of problem easily avoidable with Haiku.
The Developer team on Haiku is likely one of the best and most talented anywhere in the opensource industry and I think they rival many of finest in the closed source world.
To be honest Karl without a massive corporate backing, Haiku isn't going to progress much if at all over the next 2-3 years. These guys are trying but they have familys to feed and its hard to work on your hobby when you do it for a living, I understand that as I turned my hobby into a career and I no longer wish to work on my hobby anymore. That siad if we could find a way to employee these folks in a really open development enviroment, it could get done. They have the discipline.
Please do!
Quote:
Yes, I've realized this years ago. It's time some big company realize Haiku's potential :)
We agree here. There must be a way to fund Haiku, it has excelent potential.
For Dell,we should start here. I will write the petition tonight and link it back
http://www.ideastorm.com/
Scratch that idea, the registration utility is down. I will look for a few other platforms. The online petitions work to on ocassion ! Google should step up, its not like they aren't helping the project signficantly every year.
it's kind of demanding. we're asking for a favour. a simple, well written letter template would fit the bill IMO.
Well, ideastorm is the facility linux used to get into the dell ecosystem, might be a good place to start.
RSS feed for comments to this post