Hello HN, I'm the developer that has been hired. Happy to answer questions!<p>Or you can go make a (tax-deductible) donation to Haiku, Inc. directly to support my contract: <a href="https://www.haiku-inc.org/donate/" rel="nofollow">https://www.haiku-inc.org/donate/</a>
I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from. I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems?<p>I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to it?
I ran BeOS many, many years ago on a PowerComputing Mac-clone and remember it fondly. I had high hopes that when LG acquired WebOS that perhaps some form of BeOS as a general computing platform might resurface.<p>One question I've always had about Haiku is how faithful it is to the underlying implementation and architecture of BeOS, not so much its resultant API compatibility? Because it was the guts of BeOS which seemed to make it so special, not its component interfaces.
What's the web browsing experience like on Haiku? Really if it could run a modern browser and IDE I'd try it out.<p>It looks like there's an OpenJDK port - that'd open up a lot of possibilities[0].<p><a href="https://openjdk.java.net/projects/haiku-port/" rel="nofollow">https://openjdk.java.net/projects/haiku-port/</a>
I would love to go about writing a toy operating system, but I only know Python, and I feel like I would need to learn a lower level programming language (Rust, C++, or C) before I could even start.<p>I wonder if it would be simpler building on top of one of the linux or BSD kernels (I've heard NetBSD's is pretty cool)
In many countries a for profit company cannot accept "free" contributions, as this is in breach of minimum wage regulations and volunteering. E.g. here you can only volunteer for charities.