BIG contracts and a call to support HAIKU!

First, Oliver Tappe will be doing Haiku development for 80 hours a month at €1000 EUR per month. In total, his contracts will be for 320 hours at €4000 EUR. The reduced monthly hours will allow Oliver to work on Haiku for half a month at a low rate and work for a normal contractor at his usual rate during the other half. By doing this, Oliver will be able to reach a balance between writing Haiku code and maintaining a decent combined income.

Next and this one is a doozy -- Ingo Weinhold is going to be working on an open-ended contract with a competitive rate! He will be developing Haiku for 160 hours per month at €40 EUR per hour, which is a "mate's rate" and is significantly less than his normal rate. Any time above 160 hours per month will be done on his own personal time and completely optional. This will provide a more reliable end date to his contracts, a deadline of when the available money will run out. With our current funding levels, the duration of this contract will be 3 months (480 hours).

The immediate plans are to continue with package management. Development will continue in the HaikuPM and BuildtoolsPM github branches. Haikuports and haikuporter changes will occur in a "package management" branch on bitbucket. Once all of the important aspects work at least as well as before, package management will be merged into master. At least the following needs to be done to reach that goal:

Complete the cross-building support. (e.g. building x86_64 from something else)

Get the hybrid builds working again.

haikuporter: Implement packaging policy checking.

Rebuild all packages for all architectures.

(Mostly) complete the package management daemon (dependency resolution, post-install work) and the (CLI) package manager (distribution upgrades).

Implement tools/infrastructure for repository creation/management.

Change the build system to work with repositories.

boot loader: Add safe mode/boot old version support.

Adjust various applications (e.g. Expander) to work smoothly with a read-only system.

Note: any contributors that want write access to those branches need to speak up on the haiku-development mailing list, so they can be added.

Now, here is where you can help and have a noticeable impact ...

This past month, we have been taking additional steps to provide you with every means possible to support HAIKU. Additional fund raising methods, such as Bitcoin, Flattr, and Goodsearch have been pulled into the fold. The latter is surprisingly effective -- having raised over $60 USD within two weeks for something as simple as choosing to use a specific search engine. If that trend continues, it could add up to an extra $1500 USD per year of essentially free money! We are continuing to look into providing additional Haiku swag (available merchandise, different artwork designs and different suppliers). If you're interested in creating designs, please drop a line on the haiku-inc mailing list

Funding has been set aside for Oliver's contract, another possible contract with one of our Google Summer of Code 2012 students in October/November, and $2,500 USD for emergency reserves (future infrastructure costs, miscellaneous reimbursements, etc.) Currently $25,000 USD can be assigned and will be used to secure 3 months of contractual development for Ingo. Beyond those 3 months, you choose how long Ingo stays on contract, by donating money to Haiku, Inc.