Community

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!

After the date has been known for some time, Charlie Clark in the name of BeFAN and the BeGeistert orga team is now officially inviting to BeGeistert 019 from October 11. - 12. 2008 in the youth hostel Düsseldorf. Reservations are now open and should be made as soon as possible. To learn more about BeGeistert, see the BeGeistert website. It includes more info on directions, car pooling and costs. BeGeistert has a long history as one of the most important, if not the most important BeOS developer and fan summit. In recent years, the focus has shifted more and more towards Haiku. Pretty much every European Haiku developer is usually attending. BeGeistert is also a platform for presenting independent BeOS and Haiku software projects to interested users or potential new developers for your team. BeGeistert is a great opportunity for getting to know in person a lot of people one only knows via IRC or e-mail.

The coding sprint, which has been so successful before the last BeGeistert in January, will this time be held the week after BeGeistert. If you are a developer and would like to attend at the sprint, please contact Stephan Aßmus, who is responsible for the planning. The stay at the youth hostel during the coding sprint includes three meals (35 EUR/night). The hostel is providing a small conference room during the days where we can setup our gear and have some fun coding.

It's official! Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine. This is one more student than last year's eight sponsored by the GSoC alone! Shown below are the four selected students and their projects, in the order that the community ranked them through the Haiku Code Drive poll:

Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API

Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port

Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation

JiSheng Zhang: DV media node

The response from the community to our call for donations to fund this program was incredible. In just two weeks, we received 120 donations from 24 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA), for a total of approximately $7,500. The promptness, degree of generosity, and global reach of the response by the community to the Haiku Code Drive is unprecedented in the history of our project, and hopefully a sign of things to come in the future.

It's been one week since we kicked off the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program, and the response so far has been absolutely awesome: in just seven days the community has contributed more than US$5,000 to fund the program, and the donations keep coming in! This is happening thanks to the generosity of the community, and now you have the opportunity to influence where you want the funds that you donated to go:

The Haiku Code Drive 2008 Poll has started and will run until May 29, 11:59 (US PST), so go cast your vote now! You will need to login, so if you don't have an account with the Haiku website, this is a good time to create one from here.

I am pleased to announce that a new Haiku User Group is being started in Chicago. The Evanston Haiku User Group (eHUG) is the second user group in the US focused on the Haiku operating system, and we have a temporary website at ehug.wordpress.com. We are very similar to other user groups already in existence, but one of the differences between the eHUG and other HUGs is the fact that one of our primary goals is to design and build a computer specifically for Haiku. We currently have two members and the president of the group is Yuri Wordsmith, myself.

Google assigned Haiku five student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008, so we had to narrow down our final choice from the many high quality student applications. This was tough: many good applications had to be left out, and we really hate leaving people out, particularly those who had shown an interest in Haiku. So we started entertaining the idea of sponsoring a few of these students ourselves. Today we introduce you to the Haiku Code Drive 2008, a program designed to raise funds from the community in order to sponsor students to produce code for Haiku. This is how it's going to work.

We contacted all the GSoC students that applied for Haiku but did not make it, and asked them if they were interested in carrying out their proposed project for a $2,500 stipend each. From their response, we have created this list of students and their projects; these are the candidates for the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program. Now we are asking you, the Haiku community, to fund the program by making donations. We will then hold a public poll so that the community can influence which candidates/projects they want to sponsor. At the end of the poll/donation period, we will determine how many and which of the students will be sponsored based on the donated funds and the results of the poll. Check out all the details of the program here, including a timeline with tentative dates.

We are very pleased to announce that, for the second straight year, Haiku has been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code. The student application period will start soon, so if you are a student who would like to work on a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008, please check out our List of GSoC Ideas and Students: How to Apply pages for detailed information on how to apply. If you still have any questions specific to GSoC after reading these pages, please contact the Haiku GSoC administrator (Bruno Albuquerque). If you have any general questions about Haiku and want to start familiarizing yourself with our community, which we encourage you to, please join the Haiku development mailing list and also feel free to stop by the #haiku IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Our friendly community members will be glad to help you out in pursuing a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008 and beyond.