[12] In 2003, Phipps founded the non-profit organization Haiku, Inc. in Rochester, New York, United States, to financially support development.

[13] In 2004, the project held its first North American developers' conference, WalterCon;[14] it was also announced on this day that OpenBeOS was renamed to Haiku[10] to avoid infringing on Palm's trademarks.

[15] The BeUnited.org nonprofit organization, which promoted open standards for BeOS-compatible operating system projects,[16] announced that Haiku would be its "reference platform".

[19][20] Apart from the graphical user interface (Tracker and Deskbar, which were open sourced with BeOS 5), Haiku is original software.

[26] 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.

[28] Java support was eventually added by a team from BeUnited who had ported it to BeOS,[29][30] followed by WLAN from the FreeBSD stack.

It was decided to add support for contemporary systems, protocols, hardware, web standards, and compatibility with FLOSS libraries.

[47] Many features have been implemented, including a virtual file system (VFS) layer and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support.

[7] The graphical user interface is formed of Tracker, a file manager, and the Deskbar, an always-on-top taskbar that is placed in the upper right corner of the screen containing a menu, tray, and a list of running programs.

[citation needed] It comes with a number of preloaded applications, such as a WebKit-based web browser WebPositive, a document reader BePDF, a simple web server PoorMan, text editors Pe and StyledEdit, an IRC client Vision, and a Bash-based terminal emulator Terminal.

[63] In 2013 after the release of Haiku Alpha 4, Ars Technica reviewed the operating system and praised it for being fast, but ultimately stating that it "may not be much more than an interesting diversion, something to play with on a spare bit of hardware".