

An excellent donation from Google, extended contracts, and Google Code-In update - synchronise
https://www.haiku-os.org/news/2013-11-30_excellent_donation_google_extended_contracts_and_google_codein_update

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kirab
I really like the idea behind Haiku, but I think the chicken-egg problem
regarding drivers will make this project basically doomed from the get-go.
This could only take off with a massive investment.

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yebyen
It's not a lack of interest problem, I am on the mailing list and I can tell
you there is traffic every day.

There is a new (super-modern) package manager in Haiku, along with automated
builds based on recipes, dependency managing, and a timeline working toward
the next release that has been a long time coming.

I don't know what drivers problem you're talking about, but the only drivers
I've had a problem with are the ones for Oracle VirtualBox (and the last time
I tried, even the semi-driverless support was pretty tolerable.)

I believe it was a previous GSoC contributor who worked on adding VirtualBox
support, but their contract ended, VBox failed to incorporate the changes into
their tree, and support started to lapse.

From reading of the blog archive history, it sounded like the support was
basically done, but the VBox APIs were the moving target and nobody at
VirtualBox team was interested in adding support for another platform to their
product's CV.

If you were there on that perfect day, you had basic 3D driver support,
responsive virtual display resizing, and even virtual input drivers that did
not need mouse pointer to be captured.

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kirab
I mean the simple things. Let’s say I want to setup my 2 dual-DVI monitors
with nvidia drivers and have my monitors run at 144 and 120hz. Or I have my
wireless USB stick and want it to work properly. Also: optimized 3d drivers.
Drivers for my USB printer/scanner? And so on...

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yebyen
Oh, sure. I could see how a regular person would think of all those things as
simple things, and why you'd see that as an obstacle to adoption or progress.

I don't think we'll be seeing optimized 3D dual-link display drivers from
nVidia any time soon.

~~~
c0un7d0wn
What about ATI/AMD? they have oss docs and drivers.

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taspeotis
I've seen Haiku before and my understanding is that it's a BeOS clone on
steroids.

Is Google making charitable contributes to open source projects for the sake
of fostering open source or do they have some keen interest in Haiku? If it's
the latter: I would have thought Google's interests would be served by
donating to Linux-based projects.

