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Comment by aquabeagle | Hacker News Reader

I've tried Haiku a few times and liked it, but it feels like the beta label has been around forever and is not doing them any favors. It's 2020, you're not publishing software as a big-box release in stores, just cut a release already and then keep iterating!

From Wikipedia:

It wasn't until September, 2009 that Haiku reached its first milestone with the release of Haiku R1/Alpha 1. Then in November, 2012 the R1/Alpha 4.1 was released, while work continued on nightly builds.[8] On September 28, 2018, the Haiku R1/Beta 1 was released.[9] On June 9, 2020, Haiku R1/Beta 2 was released.

Almost 11 years and it's still not out of beta?!

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What can I say? We have extremely stringent quality standards ;)

The "beta" label signified that we had implemented all the features we thought mandatory for R1. Of course there are new ones in this release (like HiDPI support or the NVMe driver) because we still want to use Haiku on contemporary hardware, so changes still get made. But largely we are more oriented towards stabilization and "usability", i.e. fixing bugs or minor enhancements that get in the way of actually using Haiku.

But it's also the case that we do not get a massive amount of work done every month; probably around or less than a "man-month" between the dozen or two developers.

Hi!

Thanks for your work on Haiku.

I remember LOVING BeOS when it came out. I was a kid, had dabbled in breaking my parents computers with Linux distributions in the 90s, and was enamored with BeOS and was blown away by how great it worked. The fact that the user space has continued over the years is really nice to know (and have tried over various times through emulation).

Has there ever been interest or attempts at funding it so that more than a man-month could get accomplished?

Yes, there are occasionally contracts paid out by the Inc. to developers to work on things, but this depends on a developer having the opportunity and willingness to do so, since the funds will eventually dry up and they will be out of a job.

We had two major contracts (for a few months) in 2012-2013 to finish and then integrate the package management system, another in 2013 for the new kernel scheduler, and then one that lasted almost a year around the same time working on the WebKit port used in the built-in web browser (which ended because the money ran out.)

Haiku, Inc. currently has over $100k in the bank as per it's last financial report, but at only $20k (usually less) in donations a year, it's obviously not enough to be sustainable past a year or two for even a single developer. If there was actual sponsorship by the community or otherwise, then yes, a number of us would be willing to work on Haiku full-time.

I'm sure you guys have considered crowdfunding, so if I may ask, what's the reason you're not going for that? I think a lot of people would be willing to spare some money to see this get done, especially if you could put together a nice documentary/marketing video to explain why it's a cool project.

I myself am not exactly sure what I'd like to use Haiku for. I'd probably consider it if I had two different systems, one for development (which I need to use Linux for) and one for everything else (I just need LibreOffice and a usable browser).

Well, I'm not quite sure what the philosophical difference would be between the "donate now" buttons with the green meter showing yearly donations, and a formal "crowdfunding campaign"?

Overall, we are in a kind of "valley" of sorts: Haiku, Inc. gets more than enough money to pay for infrastructure and occasional miscellaneous things like that, but a long way away from enough to hire someone full-time for an indefinite period, and it's difficult to get people to contribute larger sums for a full-time developer that may become possible in half a year, two years, or ten years.

ReactOS is still in alpha after 22 years. I guess their standards are even higher.

Well, ReactOS still BSODs when you look at it wrong. Haiku is a lot more stable.

And they'll keep being in alpha as long as they keep chasing newer Windows versions.

To be fair windows does keep introducing new API. BeOS has been "stable" for some time now

IIRC the goal was to be driver-compatible (with Windows Server 2003).

Well the development team is incredibly small working on an 'entire OS' not just a kernel, in their spare time with little resources and funds compared to other open-source projects who have many more paid contributors working on a sub-system part of a Linux distro. I'd say the fact that Haiku is still alive and has most of the essential software is impressive given its situation.

Imagine if Haiku had fully funded developers working on the OS. It would be out a lot sooner with more features, but obviously that isn't the case.

Oh the other hand, probably when they first announce 1.0 a lot of new users will try it, and they probably don't want their first experience to be a buggy mess.

So what?

Beta means "not production-ready." (10+ years is an awfully long time for something to become production ready from the commercial standpoint.)

>to become production ready from the commercial

It's not a commercial product. Even if it was, what ever happened to releasing quality software? Sure, Google and Facebook release new builds constantly but everybody hates them. There used to be a time when a new version of software meant new features, not new bugs, and it seems like Haiku hearkens back to that time.

If you want to count back to its initial development, we're going back to 2001, almost two decades.

I remember being optimistic/hopeful about the project in its earliest days (following its progress on OSNews).

I wanted to see something like BeOS on x86 hardware after seeing how fast it ran on my first PC (after a long stint with Apple IIs and Macs).

A lot has changed in those 19 years, but still, kudos to the team for sticking at it.

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