October, 2008

At the end of the month, the main user mailing list openbeos@freelists.org will finally be renamed to haiku@freelists.org, removing the most apparent reference to our previous name, OpenBeOS, that our project had until summer of 2004. The old archive will remain accessible, and all subscribers will be moved to the new list automatically. We'll even send you a reminder when it's done, so that you'll remember to send future mails to haiku@freelists.org instead.

Thanks to FreeLists.org for making this possible, they have provided an awesome service for us over the past 7 years!

BeGeistert 019 was held last weekend in Düsseldorf and was, as far as I can tell, a great success. I've been to BeGeistert twice in the past (I think 2002 and 2003) and in my opinion the spirit of BeGeistert hasn't changed since then. Maybe there used to be some more non-coders among the guests and the focus was more on applications; that was of course because Haiku was still in its OpenBeOS nappies at that time...

We're very glad that Haiku has been part of Google's Summer of Code this year again. We were granted five student projects to improve Haiku. But since we had so many good and worthwhile project proposals, we set out to start our very own Haiku Code Drive. We asked for your help in the form of donations, and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response we got from you, our community: we were able to sponsor 4 more student projects to work on Haiku.

Yes, of course, you know all of that already. The reason for this review is that, since both coding events are officially over by now, I wanted to give you an overview of what has happened, and how the students fared. Not all projects have been success stories, but we were lucky to have found some very talented students this year. We're glad we had you!