Events

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.

LinuxWorld Expo 2008 Free Pass (850KB PDF)In February of 2007 Haiku exhibited at SCaLE 05, making its first appearance ever at an open source conference. Since then, Haiku has made appearances in many open source events worldwide. One big event that we have been targeting since last year was the LinuxWorld Expo; unfortunately, both this and last year we were unable to get a spot in the .Org pavilion. Fortunately, that's about to change. After some perseverance, creative thinking and thanks the good will of IDG World Expo (the organizers of LinuxWorld) and the ReactOS project (with whom we will be sharing the booth), we are excited to announce that we were able to obtain an exhibit spot at the LinuxWorld Expo 2008 to be held next month in the San Francisco Moscone Center.

We have secured a full-sized 10x10 spot (booth #1617), where we plan to showcase Haiku for the full duration of the expo, that is, August 5, 6 and 7. Our plan is to demo Haiku on two or more PCs, one of them hooked up to a projector which will display its image on a screen hanging from the booth backwall (like here). We will also hand out fliers and possibly a CD with a VMWare image, and sell Haiku t-shirts (if allowed) to raise funds for the project.

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.

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.

After a quite intensive and challenging review and selection process, we are pleased to announce that Haiku has been assigned five (5) student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008. This year, Google accepted many more mentor organizations than ever before, which made the allotment of students slots a lot more competitive. We also received applications of very high quality, which is definitely a blessing, but also made the Haiku mentor's task of narrowing down to a final selection much tougher. After thorough review of all the applications, and carefully taking into consideration factors such as immediate benefits for our project, the likelihood of getting long-term contributors, and the availability of an appropriate mentor for any given project, we have come up with the final list of students that will be coding for Haiku during the GSoC 2008 program. Here it is:

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.

The good news following our recent presence at the SCaLE conference and the great exposure that it resulted in continues to pour in. Haiku has now been invited to have a booth at the LugRadio Live USA 2008, the first LugRadio live event to be held in the US. Needless to say, we could not refuse the irresistible offer. The event will take place in San Francisco on the weekend of April 12 and 13, at the The Metreon entertainment center located at the heart of the city (map).

LugRadio is an event that covers a range of topics about free software, Open Source, digital rights, technology and more. Combined with a compelling list of speakers, exhibitors and birds of a feather sessions, this event is said to offer what feels like a combination of a rock concert and a computer conference. To bring this unique atmosphere to San Francisco, LugRadio Live USA 2008 USA will have around 30 speakers including Miguel de Icaza and Ian Murdock, over 20 exhibitors, an eclectic range of BOF and other sessions, and the live recording of LugRadio in front of an audience.