Since Ingo was the winner of the last "Thank You Award" it was suggested that we ask him a few questions. Thanks Matt Madia for the great suggestions :). The interview is below.

1. Haikuware: How long have you been involved in the BeOS/Haiku/Zeta community?

Ingo: I bought a PowerPC clone in early 1998 to run BeOS on it. The current BeOS release at that time was PR2. Be Inc. had already started to work on what would be named R3, the first release also available for x86 machines, but I just couldn't wait to start BeOS hacking. :-)

2. Haikuware: What got you interested in BeOS/Haiku/Zeta?

Ingo: Through most of the 1990's I'd been using Amiga computers (playing games, of course, but right from the start programming as well :-)). Although the OS evolved, mostly due to its design and the sticking to backwards compatibility, it became more and more dated over the years. At the same time the Amiga hardware lost more and more ground towards the x86 machines. Though maybe not actively, I had started to look for alternatives. Windows 95 couldn't really spark any interest though -- why downgrade to an OS that didn't even have preemptive multitasking and felt horrible to use?

I believe in 1997 I first read about BeOS in a computer magazine and *that* sounded interesting. Not only did BeOS have support for serious multithreading and made use of it, it also protected the system from applications and applications from each other, something that was painfully missing in AmigaOS (veterans will recall the all too frequent "Guru meditation" during application development). So a little later Stephan Assmus, who was pretty much in the same situation, and I went to the CeBIT trade show to see the BeOS live and talk to people involved. That pretty much did it -- as soon as I could afford it, I bought the forementioned PPC box.

3. Haikuware: Why is BeOS/Haiku/Zeta your platform of choice for development?

Ingo: I use Zeta only when I can't avoid it, so it definitely isn't my platform of choice for anything. I think as a user BeOS still is my favorite OS -- it feels fast, responsive, and doesn't get into my way -- though since my laptop was stolen, I only use it under VMware under Linux, which is not much fun. So my BeOS user activities are mainly restricted to mail (kudos to Oliver for the excellent Beam!).

As a developer I like BeOS' fairly clean object oriented C++ API. Though admittedly, some kits are nicer than others, and small glitches show up in all kits. That's where Haiku comes in: we can fix all the little details that are bothering us and add missing functionality (e.g. I've already added the direly missing layout management support to the interface kit). Having it all open source is real fun. No dependencies on a company to fix or improve things. If you're willing and able you can just do it yourself.

4. Haikuware: What projects are you currently working on?

Ingo: These days the only thing I work on in my spare time is Haiku. There are several subprojects I alternate between, most notably the layout management support in the interface kit and the disk device manager and disk device userland API, which will be the back-end for the DriveSetup application. Recently I decided, that the time is ripe for focussing on making Haiku actually usable, so that early adopters (myself included) can start using it full-time. One step is to port the development tool chain (Perl, auto tools, binutils, gcc). This will likely turn up quite a few critical bugs. Another step, to which I already contributed a bit, is optimizing critical system services, particularly those that currently are significantly slower than those in BeOS.

Professionally I work (together with Axel Dörfler and Stephan Assmus) for a small company named Mindwork on a distributed media-centered system. The involved platforms are Java and BeOS, later to be replaced with Haiku.

5. Haikuware: What projects are you planning for the future?

Ingo: I probably won't get around continuing to work on Haiku, though I don't know what that will be in particular. ;-) I have a BeOS networking file system, that I'd like to finish some day. Stephan's and my company YellowBites will likely get more attention again after Haiku reaches R1. That's all a bit vague, though.

In the nearer future there's the Java (OpenJDK) Haiku port, that I'm very interested in. I'll have to see where I can help -- if not with port itself then maybe with the Haiku side of things. Being a professional Java developer and enjoying Java hacking, the thought of finally getting Java on Haiku is really thrilling.

I would like to thank Ingo for taking the time to answer these questions :)

Cheers!
~TheNerd