We spoke with Michael Phipps during the holidays and asked to give us his view from the top, as he heads the Haiku project from his home in Rochester, N.Y. Michael is not big on words, as you will see from his concise answers to our questions about the Haiku-OS.org server, project status, the future, and more.
  
What's up with the server?
I got a call from Deej last night. The server core dumps on /bin/mount. So we are looking at other possibilities for hosting. The folks in .eu complained frequently that they couldn't connect to the website when it was working.

Can we expect to see haiku-os.org back online relatively soon?
Not sure what relatively soon means. We have to try to get the disks recovered and get hosting. I am hoping within a couple of weeks.

In terms of Haiku project progress, how much has changed since the summer, and has the outlook for the future improved?
The kernel has seen a lot of progress. So has the app_server. Incidentally, so has screensaver. Many of the other kits are getting fixes and such but not massive changes. The kernel is coming along - for example - we can run gcc (getting wrong results, but it runs).

With regards to the Kernel, what sort of changes have taken place under the hood?
Not so much changes as fleshing out.

At the last BeGeistert (013 in August), there were several demonstrations showing off implementations of fork(), exec(), waitpid() and so forth. Are these the kinds of improvements to the Kernel that you meant?
That and more subtle stuff. Like axeld is working on the file cache; it isn't exciting milestone stuff, but it needs to be .

Now that some time has passed for the project, and the team leaders have had quite a bit of time to organize their teams, how much organizational work has there been this year, if you could sum it up from a birds-eye view?
Our teams are pretty small and we don't do a whole lot to organize - when there are only a few people, you don't need to.

What behind-the-scenes actions have taken place to keep the project momentum going?
Momentum in oss comes from progress. That's where it is coming from.

Earlier this year you spoke about difficulties in finalizing a bank account for Haiku, the long overdue paperwork that was delivered, and talked about seeing a lawyer. What came of that?
90% done. The bank account exists. I have the legal advice I need. We got our end of the year books done; I need to submit that to NY state so that we can get the final paperwork done.

When do you expect people will be able to officially donate to the Haiku project?
They already can! We posted that on our website a while back.

Do you foresee there being a time when developers in our community can earn a living, working completely for Haiku?
Honestly, probably not. I don't think that people will donate enough to make that happen. It's also sort of tough right now - we are between big milestones.

How close are we to the next milestone?
I don't do estimates. :-)

For that matter, what is the next milestone?
I can give you an idea of what I would consider the next milestone. I would consider the next big step to be booting the kernel, app_server and net_server off of the HD using PCI/IDE and caching.

Into a graphical shell?
Maybe.

Do you have any news regarding the virtual memory system?
Nope. My personal life prevents me from doing any significant amount of coding.

Just over 366 days ago, you stated, "My guess, though, is that R1 will be "released", meaning that there is a burnable .iso on our website as a beta. I suspect we will be in serious bug fixing mode.", in an interview on OSNews... Now we know you were guessing, but just how far off the mark were you?
Well let's look at what it would take to be there. Basically, it would require more kernel work and more app_server work. We "lost" a major dev on the app_server. And axeld is only so clonable before you get DNA breakdown.