Jorge Mare, aka Koki, wrote a piece yesterday, at the Haiku site, detailing the ongoing transition process of Haiku Inc., since Michael Phipps left the project, some months ago. He describes the current (interim) Board of Directors, what has been done up to this point, the current status and what's coming down the road. Head over and read on what they have been up to.

Thanks Koki for the update, the community is always keen on the happenings inside Haiku and Haiku Inc.

In anticipation for next week's SCaLE Expo (help from February 8th till February 10th), which will take place at The Westin Los Angeles Aiport, Jorge Mare and Bruno Albuquerque, aka Koki and BGA respectively, were interviewed by SCaLE's Community Relations Chair, Mr. Gareth Greenaway.

The interview focus on Haiku obviously and ranges from when both of them started working on the project (BGA takes the lead of course) to the future of Haiku and when we might see a first beta. Head over, read it all and enjoy. Thanks Rene for the tip.

On a Haiku related note, Ingo posted a long and technical piece about Haiku's KDL, the Kernel Debugging Land. Very interesting and a good resource for the developers out there.

The Polish site Haiku-OS.pl recently posted an interview with BeZilla team member, Tigerdog. In it they cover, you guessed it, the Firefox and SeaMonkey development, including the name (Firefox vs. Bon Echo) issue. The last question is about the future, namely the upcoming Firefox 3 and its current state (not good due to the need to build it under Haiku, using GCC4, but it'll happen. An interesting read for sure, so head over and catch it.

On a extremely related note, Tigerdog just got Firefox running under Haiku, though it takes about 45 secs to load and crashes quite often. Thanks to Hubert for the e-mail about the interview.

For those who may have missed the recent announcement on the Haiku website, the culture-oriented radio station of the German national radio service, Deutschlandradio Kultur, will today be airing an interview with Haiku developers Axel Dörfler, Ingo Weinhold, Michael Lotz and Stephan Aßmus that was recorded during the last BeGeistert 018 event.

A downloadable version will also be made available later.

Andrea Anzani has continued his work with porting WebKit to Haiku, and has since last time ICO wrote about his ongoing work, been troubleshooting image rendering. He ended up writing a special image-decoder that makes use of Haiku's translator add-ons for PNG and JPG. For GIF he had to choose another way, as GIFs can be animated and Haiku's GIF translator has no support for animation.

In the last couple of days Andrea has been focusing on text encoding. The Haiku Webkit port can now show all kinds of characters, also non-ASCII.

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As you can see from the screenshot, major progress has been made by Andrea Anzani.

Over these past few days (and today as well), different news on Haiku have appeared, we'll try to give you a brief summary, this Sunday evening.

The OpenJDK Porters Group voted to sponsor Haiku's Java port. The vote was unanimous and makes Haiku the first OS to be sponsored. SUN will now setup the necessary facilities for the port, such as mailing lists, site, etc. Read more over at Haiku-OS. Also, on the Java port, Bryan Varner recently sent the initial OpenJDK project page to Michael Reinhold for public posting, which you can find here. The current status is that the Java Port team is working with OpenJDK to setup the above mentioned infrastructures for the port effort.

Also, Haiku presented its first Haiku Recognition Award to ex-leader and founder Michael Phipps. The award was signed by community members who were attending the recent BeGeistert at Dusseldorf and a video was also made. Read the post, watch the video and if you want, leave a comment for Michael.

Yesterday, Franços Revol posted a long one (a technical post) about his work on Haiku's Theme Manager, which, if you follow Haiku's CIA, you've noticed him working on it since, at least, BeGeistert. He goes over the Manager's code and includes two screenshots (hint: François, SGA's shot needs updating).

Finally, last but not least, Luc, aka Begasus, has been working on the port for the latest version of the excellent ScummVM, which we all know. He was asking some to test it and here's the result: ScummVM running on Haiku, running an old 90's game called (as you can see from the image) "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". Nice.

Phew... ok, now you're a bit more up-to-date on Haiku's "going ons". Hope you enjoyed and great work everyone. Also, don't forget to vote on the new poll. 

Coincidences are a funny thing. Last week I went to GoBe's website, just browsing, and last night I received an e-mail with the news. GoBe is back. It now has the support of a new company, investors and team, and it was launched in India, by Blue Lotus Software Solutions Pvt Ltd.

According to its CEO Venkat Kumar Tangirala, it is available for Windows only, but soon it'll be made available for MacOS X and Linux, via Java and they expect to sell "in about six months (...) at least a million copies". According to Mr. Tangirala, there's ongoing talks with ACI Asia and HCL Technologies for orders to be placed.

As for work force, engineers number 15 at the moment, though they are planning to increase them to 50, soon, all India-based I'm assuming, since it's where they're making their comeback in strenghth. A US launch is planned in 60 to 90 days.

This has come as a big surprise to me, as I'm sure it'll come to you, the reader, but the last part of the interview is even more... interesting, to say the least: "We are in discussions to acquire the BEOS and hope to close the deal soon". What to say to that... I'm trying to contact both Mr. Tangirala and Blue Lotus Software and Access, to see if I can get any more info about this whole thing. Will keep you posted so stay tuned. In the meantime, read the whole piece right here. Thanks Finn for the e-mail.

Update: I wrote ACCESS asking for a comment regarding these news, particularly the "acquire BeOS" bit, and this is what ACCESS's Director of Open Source Technologies, David "Lefty" Schlesinger, had to say: "I can categorically state that we are in no such discussions, with Blue Lotus Software, or with any other party, regarding the sale of BeOS or any related properties." That looks final to me, what do you guys and gals think? I tried to find any means of contacting Blue Lotus but without success. If I do manage to get in touch with them, as usual, I'll let you know.

Update 2: Thom over at OSNews received an e-mail sent by GoBE Software's CEO Bruce Q. Hammond. In it, among other things, he states that there is no plan to work on a Java version of GoBE. Read it all. More confusion added to the mix.

Stephan Aßmus, aka stippi, was a participating member of not only BG but also of the code-a-thon which took place during the week leading to BeGeistert 18. He now wrote a report on what happened and his views of the event. In it you can read on how they had to settle for the staff room for a few days and held the presentations in the lunch room during the weekend. It's an interesting read, so what are you waiting for? Head over and read it all. Enjoy.

As I'm sure you all know, during this week leading to BeGeistert, a code-a-thon of sorts has been going on, with coders (duh) like Axel, Ingo, François and Ithamar involved, to name a few. Source commits have increased according to the all-knowing CIA and some of them are quite... tasty. For example, today Michael Lotz submitted a patch that should enable USB 1.1 mice and keyboards to work when connected to a 2.0 hub. Also today, François commited some "old code I wrote that implements multiuser the same way R5 did as a hidden feature...".

But more has been going around, just check Haiku's CIA page for a rundown of changes they've been working on. I wonder what will come out of this week of coding, other than some poorly slept nights and lots of pizza empty boxes...

Update: Want to take a look into the code-a-thon? Then check this codercam for your voyeurism pleasure.

ImageAs I'm sure you're all aware, the lack of Java has been plaguing our OS(es) since basically ever, and several attempts have been made, over the years, to fill this gap. Attemps which have, for one reason or another (never for lack of dedication), failed to deliver. But now it seems the light is visible at the end of the tunnel. A new Haiku Java Team has been formed, which two previous Java port maintainers at its core: Bryan Varner and Andrew Bachmann.

They have been in talks with the OpenJDK project and as January 3rd, a project proposal has been officially presented by a project moderator. This will, once accepted, make the port official within the OpenJDK group. We're all hoping the team's work will bear fruit, so good luck to them.