From Bryan Varner on 4/9/06 in response to my e-mail about Java. It's completely stalled. See, there's this
technical limitation with R5 that makes it really impractical to even bother with, Haiku isn't quite ready to try and run it yet (We need Haiku to be self-hosting before it even becomes realistic to work on that), and to top it off I've got a serious gf too now. So yeah....
The thing about this is that it wasn't common knowledge. So of course Karl wanted Java as a bounty, he didn't know better unless he asked Bryan. I'm not sure when the Java bounty was added, but Java was open sourced 6 1/2 months later and was being talked about long before that, at least by May and July. Karl could've asked Bryan. Bryan could've told everyone. Haiku could've asked Bryan. None of this happened, it seems. In fact, Michael, I think you are talking out of both sides of your mouth. ;-) I shall quote you. *I have received some questions about the 'Haiku Bounties' *website* and I wanted to answer them here. It is run by a gentleman who has been a good friend to Haiku for a long time now. I have every confidence that he is trying to do the right thing for the Haiku community and that he will be upfront and honest with the money and that you can trust his word.* Don't drag Karl into things when he isn't involved. You were nice enough to take the $2,000, and as far as I know Karl had asked the people who donated to him what to do with the money. We all like arguing with Jorge ;-) Everyone needs to relax. Karl isn't a con man. Koki isn't a windbag. Michael, you could be a little more involved in the mailing lists and website. I'm sure you're doing a lot of work behind the scenes, but sometimes it's hard to tell. You always swoop in at the last minute to chime in on the latest Haiku related disaster. ;-) A little less heroics and more regularity please. :-) Koki, there used to be a list of ways you could help that didn't involve just coding. Maybe it was lost in one of the redesigns. I think having a some sort of record of your little minute meetings would be nice, even if it is read-only and posted the next day. The main benefit I see is that it will give some perspective so you don't lose the forest in the trees. Take for example Microsoft Bob or Windows ME. How could such Microsoft not jump from 98 to an NT based OS ? Was it 10 people all agreeing with each other, only seeing their own refections ? It might prevent one of those "What were you thinking ?" moments. As for a listing of who donates and what the money is spent on, the freenet project used to do something similar. http://web.archive.org/web/20011217155621/www.freenetproject.org/index.php?page=donations I wouldn't mind seeing a list of monetary contributors, even if only a handful want to be listed. I'm sure some of them will want you to use the blink tag and 48 point red font. Freenet doesn't post a list of individual donors anymore, but that probably has to do with the political controversies of freenet, rather than the validity of the idea. All that said, don't get all angry, just relax. We all want what's best for Haiku, even if we strongly disagree and see things differently.