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Since when does everything have to fill some niche? What about just trying to make a good open-source desktop OS, for fun, because they're developers?

I see this quite often on articles about Haiku. Everyone jumps on them like it's such a bad thing that they're working on something and it has no relationship to Linux.

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I'm not trying to jump on them, I'd love to be able to spend my time on that. It's just that it seems to have significant mindshare, and funding, and usually that means its answering the requirements of somebody.

Maybe they're just here to help diversify the OS world, which in itself is a nice goal.

It's a legitimate question. Haiku was being funded a few years ago and there has to be some kind of mission for a project like Haiku.

They have donations, but nobody has ever "funded" the project. Google's thrown a few $k their way ($5k this year) but I can't recall any other big name.

The mission has always been to reimplement BeOS R5 as open-source with some modernization.

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