It's been one week since we kicked off the Haiku Code Drive 2008 [0] 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 [0] 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 [0].
As we go into the last week of the Haiku Code Drive fundraiser, which ends on May 29th, we would like to get some renewed thrust, so we thought we would try a couple of things. We started by contacting Google to see if they could give us a hand in spreading the word, and they have graciously agreed to post some information about this Summer of Code like effort on their Open Source blog [1]; they have a counter that shows about 4,000 readers, so this should give us some nice exposure.
There is one more thing that we would like to try, with a little help from the community. We have drafted the following brief announcement:
Haiku [2], an open source project dedicated to the development of a new operating system inspired by the BeOS, has launched the first Haiku Code Drive [3], a Summer of Code like initiative designed to sponsor students to write code for Haiku. The program is funded by the community, who also gets to choose which candidates get to be sponsored through a public poll. The Haiku Code Drive program, initially thought out to give one more opportunity to the students that applied for Haiku in the Google Summer of Code 2008 but were turned down, has a total of five candidate students/projects [4]. Haiku is accepting donations here [5] until May 29th, and is holding the Haiku Code Drive Poll from May 22nd through the 29th. The results of the fundraiser and the poll are scheduled to be announced on the Haiku website on May 30th.
So, we ask that you submit this announcement to as many technology and/or open source related news websites, blogs, mailing lists, forums and/or any other venues that you think may be appropriate and receptive to the goals of the Haiku Code Drive. The goal is to reach out to a wider audience beyond our community as a means to help with the fundraiser effort (or at the very least raise awareness about Haiku and the Haiku Code Drive). You are free to edit the text to fit whatever specific audience you may be targeting, and to translate it into other languages as well; we only ask you keep the underlying message and that you do not change any of the links. We have heard from many non-developers ask what they could do to help Haiku; here is something simple that you can do, that has the potential to make a difference.
Together we have come this far. Let's make one last push to make the Haiku Code Drive 2008 even more successful.