Haiku (operating system)

Haiku is a free and open-source operating system capable of running applications written for the now-discontinued BeOS, which it is modeled after. Its development began in 2001, and the operating system became self-hosting in 2008. The first alpha release was made in September 2009, and the last alpha was released on November 2012; the first beta was released in September 2018, followed by beta 2 in June 2020, then beta 3 in July 2021. The fourth beta was released on December 23, 2022, still keeping BeOS 5 compatibility in its x86 32-bit images, with a greatly increased number of modern drivers, GTK3 apps and Wine port, as well as Xlib (X11) and Wayland compatibility layers. Haiku is supported by Haiku, Inc., a non-profit organization based in Rochester, New York, United States, founded in 2003 by former project leader Michael Phipps. During the most recent release cycle, Haiku, Inc. employed a developer. History of Haiku (operating system) Haiku began as the OpenBeOS project in 2001, the same year that Be, Inc. was bought by Palm, Inc. and BeOS development was discontinued. The focus of the project was to support the BeOS user community by creating an open-source, backward-compatible replacement for BeOS. The first project by OpenBeOS was a community-created "stop-gap" update for BeOS 5.0.3 in 2002. In 2003, the non-profit organization Haiku, Inc. was registered in Rochester, New York, to financially support development, and in 2004, after a notification of infringement of Palm's trademark of the BeOS name was sent to OpenBeOS, the project was renamed Haiku. Original logo was designed by Stuart McCoy (nick "stubear") who was apparently heavily involved in the early days of the Haiku Usability & Design Team, and created mockups for Haiku R2. Haiku developer and artist Stephan Assmus (nick "Stippi"), who co-developed graphic editing software WonderBrush for Haiku, updated it and developed the HVIF icon vector format used by Haiku, as well as Haiku icon set chosen by popular vote in a contest in 2007.