Haiku, everybody’s favourite open source BeOS recreation, is currently undertaking a push towards a second alpha release, a beta, and even R1. Thanks to funds raised, Haiku has been able to hire several contractors to code full-time for the project, leading to serious progress.
Several developers have been contracted by Haiku, accepting a total of 800 hours for USD 8000. “In the past few months, Haiku Inc. has been making a vigorous push towards hiring contractors in an effort to bring R1 Alpha 2 and R1 in general closer to being released,” Matt Madia wrote in an email to me, “They have accepted developer contracts totaling 800 hours of development time for $8,000 USD. As of the beginning of this week, less than 200 hours have been completed.”
You, loyal OSNews readers I’m sure, have already been introduced to one of the contractors: Stephan Aßmus. He’s one of the main developers working on WebPositive, the WebKit-based browser we’ve already reported on a few times here on OSNews. After fulfilling his first contract, his contract has been extended, so we should see WebPositive mature even more.
Another contractor is Adrien Destugues, who will be working on the Locale Kit. His contract runs for two months coming summer, so expect improvements in the Locale Kit soon. Ingo Weinhold has also been hired as a contractor, and as is to be expected, he’ll focus on low-level matters: the kernel/system and improving POSIX compliance. Hopefully, he’ll also manage the alpha 2 release cycle; this will depend on whether or not a final decision regarding alpha 2 can be reached within his contracted period.
Speaking of the second alpha, it’s closer than you’d expect; there are still a number of bugs they want fixed, but the list looks relatively small (although a small list doesn’t imply easy to fix, of course).
I should mention that you can donate to the Haiku project, and as you can see above, it appears to be money well spent. I’m technically not in favour of mentioning donation efforts on OSNews (we’re not a charity), but as some of you are undoubtedly aware of, I’m sort-of a long-time BeOS zealot. Sue me for breaking my own arbitrary rules.
Read the title.
Of my comment, silly.
–The loon
800 hours for USD 8000 makes an hourly rate of 10$/hour. So the contractors must be overseas.
Yeah, you can’t live off $10 an hour in most of the US. Well at least in the cities, there are some places in the country where you can pretend to “get by” if you rely heavily on government services like food stamps, and housing subsidies. Pretty tough way to live really.
uh, no? You can get by on $10/h in the USA without relying on government programs. Granted, this is mostly out in the more rural areas, but you can do it. I only make $8/h and I’m fine. It’s not ideal, but its not awful. Unless you are totally spoiled and want every nice thing in life
Someday I’ll make $50/h :p
It does depend largely on where you live. Here in California, even in the rural areas, cost of living is substantially higher
BTW, don’t you still live with your parents?
Hey now…
When I moved to MS and struck out on my own fresh out of school I was making about 23/hr, and boy did I live it up.
10/hr would certainly be doable for a single person, but it’s not easy.
You have to cohabitate, but there’s worse things in life than having a drunken roommate bring anonymous women around for a night or two. Oh the memories… *cringe*
I should have been more specific. You can “get by” as an individual, if you don’t do any of the things that would be considered necessary to acheive a measure of the American Dream – saving for retirement, going on vacations, going out to eat on occassion, without skimping on a bill for the month – having health insurance.
That’s all before you add the cost of a family, which is simply impossible on $10 an hour. But hey, if you think you can live on $10 an hour, even in a southern rural area (you can’t in my upstate NY rural neck of the woods), knock yourself out.
Seriously? From which alternate reality do you reside? I’ve lived (ie, not at my parents’ house) for two years on a job that pays $7.75/hour AND I go to college, without the aid of the government. It’s really all about living within your means.
I recently acquired a job that pays a $10/hour training wage ($13/hour afterward) and, I assure you, this is a very good wage for a college student. That said, I live in Michigan, which I would assume is a bit less expensive to live in than much of the rest of the nation. OTOH, I do live in a pretty large city (Grand Rapids). For those of you who don’t live in the U.S., or are otherwise uninformed, Michigan has seen better days. Our major industries (automotive, furniture, manufacturing) are pretty much shot.
On topic: Super stoked about Haiku’s progress!!!
Excellent points.
Also, one has to consider the total employment package. I happen to work for local government for a paltry $13/hr, but my benefits package more than makes up the difference. I have the equivalent of free health care (nothing deducted from my payroll and no out-of-pocket expenses for nearly any procedure), guaranteed life insurance with no exams or questions asked, a solid pension plan and perhaps the easiest job in the world. We have so much downtime I manage to read a book a day at my desk most days. Granted, it’s a job and not a career, but it’s something I do find interesting. The best part is, I have a wide open door for advancement into our computer forensics division, and I’m going to be taking that leap soon.
And no, I don’t live with my parents; I’m a homeowner just outside of Atlanta with a paid-for car and my wife has a couple of part time jobs. As others have said, it’s about living within your means.
You made me curious as I don’t live in US. If you used to be payed 8$ an hour, than how much do you have to spend for renting an apartment and paying utilities? And what is the minimum wage in US?
Without getting into the details of my personal financing, I’ll just say that I really didn’t have much left after rent, utilities and food. Before the new job, my primary mode of transportation was via bike, so that leaves out a fairly huge expense of owning a car.
Minimum wage in the US is (usually) determined on a state-by-state basis, except in the event that the state minimum wage is lower than the federal minimum (not entirely sure about the specifics in this case). Michigan’s minimum wage is $7.40/hour, making that $10/hour for working on Haiku fairly appealing to your average displaced programmer, although your average programmer probably isn’t cut out for OS development. That said, I think the developers will manage to survive.
Back on track: Once WebPositive gains a decent level of stability, I think it will be time to triple-boot my main rig, and I have a hunch others are of the same mindset. The prospect of Haiku becoming a real open-source alternative that isn’t Linux/Unix-based (not to mention actually meant for the desktop) is incredibly exciting. Hopefully the rapid progress Haiku is making will lure more developers and testers in the near future.
The problem is that costs vary radically.
Where I am, FI, not owning a care kills any already-crappy opportunities for work, unless you get extremely lucky (someone in a historical area that hasn’t been kicked out due to modern zoning offering their upstairs as an apartment, or getting work, while also living at, a college). Well, if all goes well (it usually doesn’t), that’s hundreds of dollars a year just for insurance, hundreds or even thousands more for fuel (when I last had a full-time job, I drove over 250 miles per week just for the commute), and then there’s maintenance. A several-mile commute is absolutely necessary, because it’s almost 3 miles to anything (not everything–that can be much farther), even just being in the suburbs (miles by road, not by a straight line on a map), and most people work moderately far from where they live, as housing nearer where they work tends to cost more.
Then, in a bigger city, where you can get by w/o a daily use car…if you’re not in a dorm, housing could be anywhere from $500/mo to $2000/mo.. Cost of items to get by with, like fresh food and various goods for around the house, also vary somewhat. Some cities will have a scarcity, or be out of the way, and it will all cost more. others may have markets everywhere, with good stuff at low prices (and nice little old Asian ladies trying to upsell you…on cheap bulk groceries
).
Costs of services of doctors and mechanics, likewise, vary all over the place, sometimes by 2x or even more.
So, someone in place A saying, “I can do it, so you can, too,” isn’t living in place B, where it might genuinely not be a possibility.
FI, the poster talking about living on his own and going to college at $7.75/hr…even community colleges would usually need 3 months or so of that pay for each semester, leaving only a few thousand a year for shelter and food, if he’s genuinely getting by without any government aid (such as using school loans, which no student would be able to get w/o the government making it happen), and that was a single full-time job.
If he’s in walking distance, or nearly walking distance, of everything he needs, it should be doable, maybe even with some extra for hobbies and such. Add a few miles, no bike routes, expectation of having transportation that can get you anywhere within ~30 miles at about any time as part of getting and remaining employed, or in an area where rent or mortgages are just plain high, and well, it stops working out so well.
The US is not economically the same everywhere. It can vary not only generally be region, but even by moving a few dozen miles over within a single state. Where I am may be generally more expensive than where callinyouin is, but even it is cheap compared to say, rural areas in the north east.
Edited 2010-04-11 09:12 UTC
Wow I always thought that OSnews readers were mostly in software engineering and IT administration etc… now I’m curious to know more about my fellow OS enthusiasts… Might be cool to have an anonymous survey.
Btw anybody else in the central coast of California?
And yes I’m off topic sorry about that
I’m glad to hear folks are downsizing their life expectations and income according to the pressures of the markets. We have no choice really. As for the impact this has on the middle class and coders of the world, its not good news. Coders in america will become grunt laborers at this rate.
This is not competitive salary. Those coder already spent countless hour unpaid on haiku. They also benefit from their own work as they are interested in Haiku. Stephan is in Germany, where it cost even more to live than in the US.
If you are curious about Haiku and can give a bit (or as much as you would spend on a Windows license), please do so. It really speed things up a lot and give very concrete result, it’s not wasted at all.
Edited 2010-04-07 18:17 UTC
For the last 9 years, most of Haiku developers worked on Haiku out of pleasure, not for financial gain. Its an emotional hobby. Since the contracts are only for a month, it is quite feasible that the developers are doing this during their annual leave period (from their primary job). Just check the Haiku commit log, and you’ll see that Stephan and Ingo have contributed an enormous amount of code – they’ve been working on Haiku during evenings, weekends and during holidays, so its good to see that they can get some money (more symbolic than anything) for doing something they love.
Think students, or people with a hobby that takes up lots of time.
Extra money doing something you love is always a plus.
These familiar names are likely already on the Haiku credits list so no offshore coding here.
We don’t know much about the personal lives of any of the Haiku people on the credits list but perhaps some bio information is long overdue! I suspect quite a few students and younger SW engineers bulk up the group so its more like tip money.
Looking forward to the next Alpha too.
Of course Haiku/BeOS is allowed to break all the house rules.
Lets hope we get another version of the BeOS up and running. Best of luck to the Haiku team
To be honest, with that salary, the contractors probably need to save up a bit before being able to afford working for Haiku, and it’s awsome that they are able to realize the opportunity to contribute in this way.
Perhaps more open source projects can take inspiration from this example and push forward with their own funding/code drives. There was a podcast on this subject recently: http://shotofjaq.org/2010/03/opening-the-filthy-lucre
Yes, giving a skilled developer the financial means to (atleast for a limited period) totally focus on something they love doing and would normally do whenever they have spare time is a wise usage of Haiku’s funds in my opinion. And seeing Stippi’s entusiasm for working on WebPositive is the best advertisement possible for future fund-raising. Also gratitude towards Google for their summer of code program and for picking Haiku as a supported project once again!
I’m thrilled about this news! I donated to the Wifi Encryption bounty a few days ago with some trepidation, but this is a really reassuring sign that the Haiku team’s power is well over 9000.
I think it’s far beyond 9000 now
Nice to see the good things progressing up.
The way the project is rolling along… !
You always have to make choices in life on what you spend your time on, if you get paid for something it is just easier to justify the amount of time spend on the job.
Who cares about a Desktop OS anymore? The traditional WIMP approach is boring. Everybody wants ARM and multi-touch …
What they achieved is great, no question, but it comes just a little bit late.
So who is writing a Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) clone? 😉
Great to see this being announced all shortly before BeGeistert 022, April 10-11.
For those who don’t know: BeGeistert has basically been *the* semi-annual Be-related event since the mid-90’s. http://www.begeistert.org/ It has also been the place where BeOS NG (renamed Zeta) and Open BeOS (renamed Haiku) were throughly discussed and announced.
Had hoped to be able to go this year, but unfortunately not.
800 hours sounds too little for improving an OS, but it’s nice to see Haiku gets any small boost it can.
It is *NOT* to work on the entire OS, but rather a single aspect.
To improve networking.
To improve a browser.
To track down a bug or conditions in a module that only crashes the module once a day.
To improve a single fundamental part of the OS.
I wonder if these programmers are new to the Haiku project. If so, I’d like to see how long it takes them to learn the codebase and produce useful code.
I recently downloaded the Haiku source and compiled it, but adding new functionality to it has proven to be a little difficult. The code is fairly clean, but it does not appear to be well-documented. Maybe I’m just spoiled because the code I work on for my full-time job requires full Javadoc comments for all classes and public methods. In any event, better comments and documentation would definitely make it easier for a developer to contribute to the project.
All three of these developers have been contributing to the project already.
Stephan and Ingo are long time Haiku devs, having touched many areas of the codebase already.
Adrien is a previous GSoC student and has been improving the localization features of Haiku ever since.
In this way, the money is going to support actual coding/improvements rather than paying someone to learn the codebase for a month.
Suggest you download the copies of BeBook and HaikuBook that are available thru the main site.
The problem is, those primarily only cover writing apps for Haiku/BeOS ; what he’s after based on his comment sounds more like documentation of the OS code itself, which neither of those will provide.
You are absolutely correct. I have already read most of the documentation on the Haiku web site, but the OS code is much more complex and has little to no documentation. The people on IRC were friendly and eager to help, but they were not familiar with the part of the system I wanted to modify. My next step is to pose my questions on the mailing list, but it feels like it’s taking a very long time to make some relatively simple changes. I imagine everyone who has the time to write good documentation is too busy adding new functionality.