Haiku (operating system)

Haiku, originally OpenBeOS, is a free and open-source operating system for personal computers. It is a community-driven continuation of BeOS and aims to be binary-compatible with it, but is largely a reimplementation with the exception of certain components like the Deskbar. The Haiku project began in 2001, supported by the nonprofit Haiku Inc., and the operating system remains in beta.

On 17 August 2001 Palm, Inc. announced the purchase of Be, Inc., marking the end of BeOS development. The day after, Michael Phipps started the OpenBeOS project to support the BeOS user community by creating an open-source, backward-compatible replacement for BeOS. Palm refused to license the BeOS code to a third-party, meaning that OpenBeOS had to be reverse-engineered. In 2003, Phipps founded the non-profit organization Haiku, Inc. in Rochester, New York, United States, to financially support development.

In 2004, the project held its first North American developers' conference, WalterCon; it was also announced on this day that OpenBeOS was renamed to Haiku to avoid infringing on Palm's trademarks. The BeUnited.org nonprofit organization, which promoted open standards for BeOS-compatible operating system projects, announced that Haiku would be its "reference platform". In February 2007, the project held a Tech Talk at Googleplex, attended by ex-Be engineers as well as Jean-Louis Gassée who voiced his support for the project. There is also an annual conference, BeGeistert, held in Germany since 1998 when BeOS was active.

Apart from the graphical user interface (Tracker and Deskbar, which were open sourced with BeOS 5), Haiku is original software. The modular design of BeOS allowed individual components of Haiku to initially be developed in teams in relative isolation, in many cases developing them as replacements for the BeOS components prior to the completion of other parts of the operating system.^{[citation needed]}

The first project by OpenBeOS was a community-created "stop-gap" update for BeOS 5.0.3 in 2002, featuring open source replacement for some BeOS components. The kernel of NewOS, for x86, SuperH, and PowerPC architectures was successfully forked that same year, and Haiku has been based on it since. The app_server window manager was completed in 2005. In July 2006, Haiku developer Stephan Aßmus introduced Icon-O-Matic, an icon editor, and a storage format (HVIF) with a rendering engine based on Anti-Grain Geometry. The PackageInstaller was created by Łukasz Zemczak at the 2007 Google Summer of Code.

Java support was eventually added by a team from BeUnited who had ported it to BeOS, followed by WLAN from the FreeBSD stack. Alongside a port to GCC4, the first alpha release finally arrived after seven years of development. Initially targeting full BeOS 5 compatibility, a community poll was launched to redefine the future of Haiku beyond a free software refactoring of BeOS from the late 1990s. It was decided to add support for contemporary systems, protocols, hardware, web standards, and compatibility with FLOSS libraries. On October 27, 2009, Haiku obtained Qt4 support.

The WebPositive browser was first preloaded with Alpha2, replacing BeZillaBrowser. After this, much time was spent on building a package management system, which went live in September 2013. Beta1 arrived in 2018, and one of the most notable new features was the PackageFS and package installation through the HaikuDepot and pkgman; Beta1 was the first official Haiku release to support full package management.

Wine was first ported to Haiku in 2022.