I really like the idea behind Haiku, but I think the chicken-egg problem regarding drivers will make this project basically doomed from the get-go. This could only take off with a massive investment.
It's not a lack of interest problem, I am on the mailing list and I can tell you there is traffic every day.
There is a new (super-modern) package manager in Haiku, along with automated builds based on recipes, dependency managing, and a timeline working toward the next release that has been a long time coming.
I don't know what drivers problem you're talking about, but the only drivers I've had a problem with are the ones for Oracle VirtualBox (and the last time I tried, even the semi-driverless support was pretty tolerable.)
I believe it was a previous GSoC contributor who worked on adding VirtualBox support, but their contract ended, VBox failed to incorporate the changes into their tree, and support started to lapse.
From reading of the blog archive history, it sounded like the support was basically done, but the VBox APIs were the moving target and nobody at VirtualBox team was interested in adding support for another platform to their product's CV.
If you were there on that perfect day, you had basic 3D driver support, responsive virtual display resizing, and even virtual input drivers that did not need mouse pointer to be captured.
I mean the simple things. Let’s say I want to setup my 2 dual-DVI monitors with nvidia drivers and have my monitors run at 144 and 120hz. Or I have my wireless USB stick and want it to work properly. Also: optimized 3d drivers. Drivers for my USB printer/scanner? And so on...
Oh, sure. I could see how a regular person would think of all those things as simple things, and why you'd see that as an obstacle to adoption or progress.
I don't think we'll be seeing optimized 3D dual-link display drivers from nVidia any time soon.
If your Wireless USB stick is supported by FreeBSD, then it will be supported by Haiku since they use the same drivers.
Thanks to Gutenprint as well, Haiku now supports a wide range of printers too. It doesn't support scanners, but then again Linux doesn't really do a good job either (Anyone who has used SANE will know how unstable it is).
Decent 3D monitor support is something you won't find in FOSS, at least not yet.
I've seen Haiku before and my understanding is that it's a BeOS clone on steroids.
Is Google making charitable contributes to open source projects for the sake of fostering open source or do they have some keen interest in Haiku? If it's the latter: I would have thought Google's interests would be served by donating to Linux-based projects.
