[openbeos] Re: donating

Karl vom Dorff wrote:
In light of the 'growing pains' of Haiku (as quoted by OSnews), and the recent heated discussions here, I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents (quite a bit more actually) and blow some air into the fire....

I don't like to do these things in public, but I think that the community deserves an answer to this.

Through my efforts, ~ $2000 was donated to Haiku. Most recently on Aug. 5th, $750 was donated on behalf of those who donated to Haikubounties, and an additional $500 will be donated on Oct 31st if the USB bounty isn't taken up. 

Yes, this is true.

On Aug. 5th (3 weeks ago), I asked (as a condition of the donation) that along with the donatiion, an official acknowledgement and little thank you be posted on Haiku's website, as well as an outline of what would be done with the money. Also, that Haiku administer the bounty idea and host it (under my direction) from now on.

And I responded to you, making clear, among other things, that we were in the middle of a website update, as well as a dozen other things. By the way - there was *NOTHING* that I can see in your original emails about you necessarily hosting the bounties that we would take up. I welcome you pointing that out to me, privately.

What has happened so far? A big fat nothing...

Could we have put a "thank you" up on the site, yes. But we could not have met all of the other conditions that quickly. We have talked about bounties, but haven't reached any definite particulars (i.e. what we should have a bounty for and how much it should be). As you well know, it is very hard to come up with a particular bounty that can be done and is affordable.

How do those who donated to Haikubounties really know that the money they donated went to Haiku without an announcement from Haiku? I'm glad that they take my word for it, because that is what happened, but it should still be acknowledged and thanked and the info made publicly available. This shouldn't take three weeks.

I didn't realize that there was a timeframe on it, especially since you didn't express one. Additionally, since we can't announce a bounty system right now (because we haven't agreed on any bounties), we can't really say that we have met all of the conditions. Yes, the money was transfered. That's all we can say because that's all that has happened.

I'm pretty pissed off, and feel as though Haiku doesn't care, and quite frankly feel as though my efforts are moot. So, when the deadline approaches for the last bounty, if things haven't changed, I quit fundraising for Haiku.

I feel bad that I haven't met your expectations. I would, however, point out that you didn't say one word about this to me in the last three weeks. I have responded to every email from you in since this came up back in July.

Does it make me think again about donating money to Haiku when I see 16 month old financial statements, no conditions are met, there's no acknowlegdement, etc? You bet. Haiku has sold me not to donate any more money due to their inability to manage, ridiculous delays, and sheer incompetence.

Yes, the financial statements. Fine - that's posted, as of now. As for the rest of it, I am going to be kind and let those things go.

With respect to the website... this is all being gone about the wrong way. Why do I see one person, Waldemar, in charge of everything? Why do I see one 'plonetest' site? Who says Haiku's website and the drupal theme should have only 9 topics in the navbar menu? What if, as it should according to the condition of the donated money by Haikubouties, the theme should include 'bounties' in the navbar?

Wow. Ok... Waldemar is doing the web dev. Kurtis did it before. Big deal. He is NOT "in charge of everything". He is taking input from a lot of people, including tons from this list. How many plonetest sites would you LIKE to see? Where is this 9 topics thing coming from?

We agreed that there should be a bounties program continued. Sure. When I asked you to come up with some driver ideas for it, you didn't seem all that interested in the idea, three weeks ago. So it falls to whomever wants to suggest them. Since we haven't come up with any, there is no bounty program yet.

The thing is, there should be multiple websites for those taking part in the contest that people can vote on, and it shouldn't be limited to one Haiku Drupal theme. Just as in the icon contest, you shouldn't be limited to icon-o-matic to create your icons. You should use whatever implementation works best, whether it be mambo, wordpress, drupal or whatever. You should be allowed to add whatever you want in the navbar with the navbar contents listed here: http://haiku-os.org/learn.php?mode =news_view&id=411
as a basis for what should be on the website. Leave it up to the people who vote for the new website what should and shouldn't be included on the site and what system it uses, not what one person who made the contest says what should be on it and what it uses, or what Koki or Axel suggests he thinks is right...

This makes no sense at all. We looked at a lot of CMS apps. Many of them just don't do what we want. Functionality decides what CMS to use, nothing else. That one person can make a nice Wordpress theme and another person comes up with a nice navigation system in Mambo is pretty irrelevant if, say, you can't have single signin or our web hosting doesn't support that system. We picked the CMS. Then we populated it with mostly existing content. Last we theme it. That seems pretty sensible to me. The first part was the hard part because so many of the CMS systems that we evaluated didn't have the power to do what we wanted. Drupal, the best that we found so far, is getting some serious shoe horning to make it work for us.

And that, was my rant. 

It is a classic for the ages. :-)

Peace, 

Definitely. :-)

Karl 

Michael

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