Thanks to Hugo Santos (a Computer and Telematics Engineering student in Aveiro - Portugal), Haiku will now be able to compile network drivers written for FreeBSD.

[EDIT]
Not sure everybody knows it, but the Haiku network stack is a derivate of the BSD one, so this compatiblity could sounds a normal thing, but it's not. Since the Haiku team makes a lot of dedicated coding for our lovely OS, this compatibility was not the point. But it was not counting on the Hugo idea.

I just got an email from Axel D, clarifying some mistakes i wrote:
"while the Haiku network stack implements the usual (POSIX) BSD API (like almost every stack out there), it's not a derivative of any BSD stack, it's genuine work, but with a very BONE like architecture. The FreeBSD compatibility layer is as complex as a Linux compatibility layer would be :-)"

Sorry for that, and thanks for dropping me this email !
[/EDIT]

This new compatibility is not a binary one, understand source code has to be recompiled for Haiku. But the big (who said huge ?) thing of the Hugo work is that his library provides a bridge between BSD and Haiku code that makes compiling a BSD source for Haiku possible without (or just a few bytes) modifications. Not to say that hardware network cards compatibility for Haiku is making a big step forward !

For the little story, here is a little quote of the Haiku blog related post:

"The ability to use FreeBSD drivers with little to no changes in the code expands Haiku's hardware support with little burden to our pool of developers, which is a good thing. By the way, this idea was inspired by Marcus Overhagen's ipro1000 driver, which is Intel's FreeBSD driver ported to Haiku using a very specific compatibility layer."

More information available on Haiku Getting a FreeBSD Network Driver Compatibility Layer (www.haiku-os.org)