Submitted by Haiku has listed the accomplishments of Haiku’s Summer of Code students. “2007 Was our first year involved in the Google Summer of Code. Looking back on it, it is easy to say that it was a resounding success. We were able to handle 8 students. Work accomplished included a mostly-complete FireWire stack, major improvements in networking, and more.”
With all that was accomplished, where is (or when will come) the file copying that works correctly? 🙂
The phrase “beating a dead horse” doesn’t mean much to you, does it?
Whoo-boy! I got modded down into oblivion! That was fun. I don’t just beat dead horses… I pulverize them! 🙂
“The squeaky wheel gets the grease”, “the squeaky hinge gets the oil”, “the squeaky mouse gets caught in the trap” and all that, whatnot. 🙂
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
It seems with all the ranting recently about Linux not be well suited for the Desktop (not that I think that’s correct), there’s an opportunity to get in with what in my view has always been a very desktop oriented platform with Haiku (and BeOS before it). Maybe Haiku could pick up some of those disgruntled (and often still talented) Linux devs.
Preface: I’m trying to be constructive, while being a bit critical.
Compare with the FreeBSD summary: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode-2007.html
Also, while this could be a big chance to garner some attention for the project, it seemed to end with a whimper rather than a bang this year. What do you think?
My $0.02
Haiku doesn’t have nearly the number of developers nor the resources that FreeBSD has. They’re hardly comparable. Haiku did a good job with what they had. I hope the students continue to to contribute on their own time. Congrats to everyone involved.
On a superficial level, I was referring to aesthetic presentation, spelling, and grammar in the results posting in comparison to the FreeBSD page.
On balance, I think the GSoC project topics were pretty good, and the number of students selected and that completed their work was pretty damn good.
How well this effort was promoted and updated by the Haiku organization left something to be desired, imo. I hadn’t heard much about Haiku & GSoC since it was announced Haiku was participating.
Google’s status as a tech company could perhaps lend some of its good will and publicity (and legitimacy) to the community, and I was hoping that GSoC would raise awareness of this project somewhat. Maybe even further some symbiosis between Haiku, Google and the other O/S communities participating.
I’m not sure to what extent that happened, although the opportunity existed to be capitalized on.
What spelling and grammar mistakes are you speaking of?
Presentation not nice,ummm..okay.. but that’s opinion.
As far as your complaint that you have not heard much, well, if you don’t follow it, then your not going to hear much.
There was mail list, there were the student blogs on the website, there was activity on IRC, there was code check in’s.
I haven’t heard a single thing about any other GSoC projects.
I think the students took on some very difficult tasks to complete over a short summer. Congrats on their successes.
I think you are missing the larger point of the post you are replying to.
The relative lack of comments @ OSNews of all places on this topic is making that point (about a third of them are mine, even).
I won’t take much time to debate what you stated, but as you can plainly see ( http://haiku-os.org/tags/gsoc ), there was not that much on the website about GSoC over the summer. A handful of blog posts. I’m on the primary mailing list, not much happened there either. I follow the project more than 99.999% of the world, and this is my perspective.
Of course I think it was a great thing Haiku was part of GSoC. Congrats to all involved! Good code, good money.
Let’s put some more ‘marketing’ behind the effort next time, and it will be good publicity too. I’ll be sure to volunteer in 2008. Thanks.
there was not that much on the website about GSoC over the summer. A handful of blog posts. I’m on the primary mailing list, not much happened there either. I follow the project more than 99.999% of the world, and this is my perspective.
Am I the only one who sees this as a colossal missed opportunity on your part? You say you followed it closely–more so than “99.999% of the world” even–so why haven’t you put together a blog post or OSNews.com article on the subject and submit it to Slashdot?
That way you get the information you think is important out to the public as well as garnering more publicity for the project?
–bornagainpenguin
Nobody expected this event to singlehandedly propel Haiku onto everyone’s desktops, did they?
It looks like there’s an assortment of good stuff that normal users would need along with some nice foundational reinforcements.
Additionally, Haiku’s got a brand new perfectly fair scheduler without any sort of dispute. Isn’t that good news? B^)
I really can’t see any one loosing in this game. For Google, cheap marketing and image building, for students, good cash and for Haiku a welcome addition of code.
congrats to all!
Not to sound critical or anything but…
In the end, which audience will Haiku be targeting?
Is it their intention to overtake *nix and Windows or just provide an educational platform for software engineering students–interested in operating system theory–to learn from?
The FAQ doesn’t really cover this: http://haiku-os.org/about/faq
I can only speak for myself, but I don’t think anyone is aiming for world domination.
Haiku is written in the image of BeOS, which was fast elegant and easy to use. The coders and volunteers surrounding the Haiku project are generally idealists, who hope to provide a positive and realistic alternative Operating System that is simple yet powerful.
Target audience, IMO, would be younger tech minded people, hopefully new computer users and of course the huge audience of people that have avoided the benefits of computer access/technology in general by reports technical hurdles, inconsistencies, and the desire to avoid the pain in the ass they can be to deal with. I know plenty of very intelligent people that simply can’t be bother with using a computer except when they absolutely ‘have to’. Let’s lower their barrier to entry.
Haiku design goals are cohesive, and the sense I get is that even though it is an open community, the current ‘steering commitee’ recognizes successful products generally occur when their is strong leadership and goals.
So, with the group that controls SVN commits and direction, the enormous undertaking of this project keeps on track by not allowing side roads to be taken at whim. Keeps us out of the weeds so to speak.
Hmm, kind of a long reply, but I hope that helps.
They’ll be targeting the hopes and aspirations of the people who nearly 8 years ago could run a tiny 38MB exe file from windows which installed an operating system that let you surf the internet, play music, watch tv (my tv tuner was supported natively), and do the basic essentials with out having to piss about with windows 9x, or the laters.
It’s interface was clean, simple no nonsense. There was no bloat, or waste, back then windows was considered bloated. What is it now?
You ran it, it worked. It was heaven.
I tried the vmware image of haiku last night and was quite surprised at how far along it really is, obviously its on preset hardware but I was still very impressed by it.
I can see it increasing its share amongst the hobbyists.
…is a WalterOS like porthybrid (with BeOS PE) to the ASUS Eee 700701 which as a stable hardware platform could be a great jumping off point for developers to use as a demo product…
–bornagainpenguin
I will probably by one
Perhaps some fork of haiku must be dune to save the flash memory as the swap file will write/read many times.
http://www.eeeuser.com/
Perhaps some fork of haiku must be dune to save the flash memory as the swap file will write/read many times.
No need, the swap file support is still missing at this point
umccullough :
“No need, the swap file support is still missing at this point
”
cool do we need one? perhaps on a ram disk?
Edited 2007-09-24 06:57
More publicity with regards to Haiku’s participation in Google Summer of Code would have been nice, yes. But it’s always much easier to point out areas of improvement rather than actually doing the work. Haiku is our volunteer project. Every mentor has tried his best to fulfill all his duties, to take care of their students and help them where they can. I don’t think we have failed in this regard and that is something I find more important than anything. We have tried to keep the community up to date about what is going on. Some important contributors who focused on news items and similar promotion work have left the project however, that was unfortunate for the publicity work. As some people here have already pointed out, there was quite a bit of information and updates given. There have been indepth blog posts by some students about their work. Other work was discussed on the mailing list. Sure, there could have been more effort put into publicity, but what gives anyone the right to criticize the few people who already put as much energy into the project as they can? In the long run, this stuff will only make contributors realize that there is more bad feelings than fun involved.
As I follow both e-mail lists, reading iscomputeron.com and Haiku-os.org think there was not much new news but the summary was a nice summary to read
.
stippi : I hope that you will have a good time at GSoC Mentor Summit.
I am not sure what else could have been done to promote Haiku’s participation in the Summer of Code. In fact to compare to your “ideal” FreeBSD, we had considerably more coverage of the GSoC. Looking at their home page I only see one mention of the GSoC, and that is the final summary you linked to.
We had plenty of students apply (meaning we did enough marketing for that purpose), we got eight high quality applications to fill our quota (that was all Google allocated us), and only one student was unable to complete his work (which he regretted very much.) Seven of the eight students wrote blog entries on our web-site during the summer (several students wrote quite a few.) The only one who didn’t was Hugo Santos, but that was because he did most of his high quality work before the GSoC even officially started.
Two of the students wrote extensive “conclusion” blog posts about their experience. Then we got summaries from all the mentors and posted those in the news item linked here. Also in case you didn’t notice, our style for the summary was inspired by FreeBSD, but obviously we have slightly different formatting on our site. If you can provide a better looking HTML template that fits in with the style for our site, we will gladly use it next year.
My final rebuttal to your criticism would be to say I’m not sure if the Summer of Code is that much of a promotion tool anyhow. Usually only other developers or technical people know about it, and usually those people are only interested in the projects they already know about. The only real need for “marketing” is to get students to apply, and I think we did that well. Everything else is just for updating the existing community.
With that said, I suppose it wouldn’t have hurt to post a few more news items about it, like at least after the mid-term evaluation. In addition I intend to do what I can to market and promote Haiku at the GSoC Mentor Summit. Given the experience at “FalterCon”, other geeks/developers tend to be interested in Haiku. Also for anyone in the Bay Area, keep your schedule open on October 7th (the day after the Mentor Summit), as we will be having a Haiku get together on that day.
— Ryan Leavengood
From the point of view of gaining mind share, GSoC is a very powerful marketing tool. Not only did Haiku get eight students to write much needed code, but thanks to GSoC Haiku gained visibility to a lot of people who otherwise would have not even heard of it. That includes not just the students, but also a lot of the people in the open source scene as well as among Googlers themselves.
Being part of GSoC also gives a small project like Haiku a great boost to the image of the project and in the way it is perceived in terms of viability; a seal of approval of sorts, if you will. All in all, from a marketing point of view, GSoC may have been the best thing to happen to Haiku in 2007.