Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

... the default _is_ open source in this day and age. Reasons should be provided for the exceptions to the default.

Why is community support required? I'm pestering a company for a reason!

Allowing community support is nice, and probably something that would distinguish a "ideal" Jolla from Android, since Android's "throw it over the wall" model doesn't really encourage community. Functioning community support ultimately provides the highest level of customizability for the final user, and with almost zero developer or regulation or documentation or ... cost to the parent company.

But I don't think that any company should be _expecting_ people to work for free.

Android is, to my annoyance, actually more "open source" than Sailfish (albeit not free software). For me, this discussion has been obsolete for at least a decade, and 'closed source' has lost.

(Sadly, free software didn't exactly win)

Even Windows CE was practically open source.

I'd buy one! I'm exactly asking the same. I thought Jolla would be this.

To put it simply: because if they fail at it, they'll alienate a portion of their early user base (which includes me).

And as I said, the default is free software. Unless you can really show how closed source is going to help their business, then the default should be free software.

And where are all those early 'Nokla' N800 clones?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Heh, thanks!

I think you're right that they can't completely lose sight of the consumer market, but this would fit in quite nicely with something they are already doing quite well, in a way that competitors aren't: shipping security updates regularly. Surely that's important for businesses, even if most consumers don't really care?

You can install packages as nemo using pkcon, but not zypper:

Surprised me!

Something simple like a pattern lock would be fine, surely? I would probably make updates for already installed apps automatic (like unattended upgrades), but installing and removing sotware require authentication.

It's something I've been meaning to research for a while now, I must confess I only have a vague idea of what it does and how it works.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

to long-wave? i think they are going to turn that off in the next year or two.

don't get me wrong, i've been here since the n900, but we need to reach this nirvana soon....

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Implement OneDrive and Dropbox backup/restore sync plugins

https://bugs.merproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

It is actually not that much of a security issue and for example Fedora does the same thing. You can use the packagekit (pkcon) interface to only install signed packages from trusted repos - not just any arbitrary package from an URL or local file.

So as long as your repos are properly signed and are not compromised this should be fairly safe, with only possible attacks being some sort of ddos (which can be done much easier with user-level capabilities) or exploiting vulnerabilities in signed packages until they are fixed (packaging scripts executing untrusted input at root, etc.).

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

While I don't care about OneDrive or Dropbox myself, this seems like a move in a good direction and opens the way for adding more backends, such as for OwnCloud or Seafile in the future.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

https://twitter.com/stskeeps/status/644081075128532993

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Is it updated to current version source code we had already or more thing were open?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

what does it mean for unexpert user like me? what parts they have opened?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I'm always reading "open-source this, open-source that"... but would it really bring a benefit?

Most people are consumers, not contributing to the open-source stuff they use at all. The people who develop and contribute to open-source projects are very rare.
I think this thread resembles this as well. There are only a few developers among many consumers.
So we also don't see much progress with Nemo or the open-source parts of Sailfish, except for the work Jolla is doing.

The successful open-source projects are successful, because people employed by companies do paid work on them in the interest of their company. The Linux kernel is a prominent example of how a range of companies are working together on a common
operating system.
And if you look at Mer or Nemo, you'd notice that most contributions are coming from people paid by Jolla. And with open-sourcing the few remaining closed parts of Sailfish, this would not change.

The community of developers is a utopia. The community consists of consumers with a few active developers among them. Most open-source projects are one-man-shows that disappear once the developer loses interest. Almost all bigger projects are actually paid work.

Why don't we see open devices running Mer? I think the best person to answer this question would be Aaron Seigo of the Vivaldi project. It simply is not possible to find
acceptable mobile hardware running on open drivers. The Jolla devices are as open as
it can get. And they are running Mer on top of a closed-source Android hardware adaptation layer dictated by the manufacturer.

On the other end is the Silica UI that was promised to be opened (stay tuned as stskeeps said...), but actually is almost entirely BSD-licensed and open already.
Why didn't anyone reimplement the small closed-source part of Silica to make the
BSD-licensed open components run on top of Nemo, so that you have the full
Silica experience on Nemo? After more than two years of having the BSD-licensed Silica code out in the open, I really wonder. Maybe because the community of developers is a utopia...

IMHO it is NOT Jolla who is to blame for the lack of contributions to Sailfish.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I am not. Why are you saying I am?
It is a cool project built by damn smart people.

Please understand that there are people not interested in joining communities. They just want to fix that one annoying bug (or two), not embarking yet another journey...

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I thought this thread was about sfos 2.0 not a thread for Stallman fanatic opinons.

You people still, after all this years, seems to not understand that no device can be fully open source. There are plenty of reason for that.

Not even a damn laptop is fully open source this days.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I think the dynamic of the community changed to lord of the flies days or weeks after the Jolla Phone went out into the wilds. There was a very clear divide between people who felt the software was shockingly far behind, and very messy, and the crowd who felt that it was their divine mission to shield Jolla from any criticism and for the most part deny that things were any less than perfect. The former massively outnumbered the latter, as history has shown, but the loudness and aggressiveness of the latter meant criticism and useful feedback was extremely limited. More people are putting their heads above the parapet these days, but most of the Maemo / Meego community and developers and Jolla early adopters are lost forever now, and even if Jolla has turned a corner, it's going to be extremely difficult to turn the ship around and attract newbies.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Installed sailfish 2.0 and played with for few minutes but my screen caved in and no longer accepts touch input :( 2.0 seemed quite nice actually but didn't get to use it much.

Back to using my N9 and i am falling in love with it again <3

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

It surprises me that I would see doubts about this on this forum of all places..

And yet both the many users and the minority of developers benefit. Developers make patches and receive donations/reputation and users enjoy significantly increased level of customization of the platform.

I think this thread is a good example indeed. A number of people is complaining about some perceived mis-features of Sailfish 2.0. A developer appears with a number of patches (possible because Qml is "open source" in the webOS ausmt sense). Everyone wins. Zero cost to Jolla.

Did you expect random people would do Jolla's work for free?

Just be thankful that they're scratching their itches and gracefully embrace their free contributions. Like every other open source project.

Maybe. So what? Why is that an argument against open sourcing 100% of Sailfish?

I call this the "Netscape mentality".

You should never _expect_ people to work for you for free. If it happens, then you embrace it with your arms open. But since when the deal's been "i'll only open source this if you implement feature X for me?".

No argument. But again, so what?

Couldn't disagree more.

I have developed a number of small utilities or hacks for desktop Linux that most people have never heard about. Bus factor=1. Yet I still receive daily emails about them; with ideas, patches, bug reports, questions and comments. Random people I have never heard about have even packaged them for some Linux distributions. Some of them large ones, some of them probably one-man shows.

Do you know what do I call this?

I call this a fscking miracle.

The number of man-hours contributed by these persons greatly exceeds the amount of time I've spent on these projects. I use them almost daily and yet hardly ever find a big enough free time slot to work on them myself. Thus, I almost always encourage any person who emails me to set up a fork. They never do it either, because they lack the time too.

And yet with the few man-minutes that everyone can offer, the projects improve, and _I_ benefit from the results.

To sum it up: I get a _daily_ reminder about this wonderful utopia of developers. And my small utilities are mostly niche garbage.

I'm sorry your impressions are different.

I would ask Jolla. Why did they need to make SailfishOS? And why did they need to make it closed?

Just to repeat past Nokia mistakes in an era in which we are enjoying peak levels of open-sourceness in the competition?

I would never expect Jolla to be the developer of the most closed source mobile operating system. Yet now this scenario no longer seems as unlikely as it would have seemed on day 1. Again, ironically, many other open operating systems will be reusing the components Jolla developed!

Trade-offs. You have the 1000eur phone quite close, on this very forum, which shows you can actually do acceptable open mobile hardware. Stallman was even close to approving it; the FSF did not approve it based on what many people believe is a small technicality. That's a device that is "as open as it can get".

But despite the Android-only hardware, I find I easily like Jolla's hardware, possibly even more than the software. TOH. Schematics!. Actual access to people who know the hardware. I can ask for an unlocked bootloader and I get it. Without having to needlessly explain "why would anyone want an unlocked bootloader" for the nth time. All these things are mostly unheard on most other manufacturers. Even the manufacturers chosen by Ubuntu are crap in this regard.

One of the primary reasons I use a Jolla daily.

Again, why would I work for free? I am paying Jolla to do this for me!

Now, release the source of the mail client UI, and I will quickly make a hackish patch to enable multiple identity support, since that's one of my itches*. Since I only have a few man-minutes of free time maybe I will just hardcode the list of identities to avoid having to understand how account setup works. The result would be useless as a Nemo contributon, but still useful for some, developer-y people. And maybe someone else will eventually develop the UI to configure it.

* fictitious example

But they are definitely to blame for the closeness of Sailfish.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

What do you mean by your screen caved in? Did you punch the phone?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Just one day stopped working.

There is a small section going across the screen that no longer works (see picture) green means working, red means no touch. And after few minutes the whole screen won't respond. A reboot helps only temporarily. But the part in the middle stopped working all together and nothing seems to help :(((((

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I guess nobody expects random people to do others job for free. However, that's the argument offered for open sourcing everything as if open sourcing was the holy grail to end all suffering in the fsckin world...

Because they needed a product to sell and Nemo has a bit different UI paradigm, which is not easily changed. To deliver commercial product you need control over such things.

Another fact of life is that it's impossible to deliver 100% open source product these days. Some closed parts are likely to be open sourced, but it may take time if it's to be done in a way that benefits all parties.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Yes, it would.

If Jolla were to die tomorrow, the UI dies with it. Again. The same as has happened with the N900 and N9, to varying degrees. The same as has happened with various other consumer electronics products over time.

Having the source code available helps stave off untimely obsolescence, and possibly even opens up new and more interesting avenues of putting it on more hardware, or doing things with it that weren't originally envisaged/intended: you already see this to some degree with the fairly healthy patching community that has built up around the UI.

The difference there is that Nemo is not a shipping product. It's not usable as-is, and as making it usable is far from interesting or entertaining work, not many people want to do it. Creating new UIs (like Glacier) and such has taken priority over doing the boring, but necessary work like keeping things building, fixing bugs and adding required functionality to applications. This is why I gave up doing Nemo in my free time back in 2013: because it felt like I was spinning my wheels in the mud virtually alone with no real benefit.

Sailfish on the other hand is already a shipping quality product. Contributing to something that is already running and useful attracts a completely different demographic than a project that has hundreds of thousands of LOC but can hardly make a phonecall, say.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

For a case study of this, consider Qt, which opened up to external contributions & maintainers in 2012, and now has approaching 30-40% of the contributions coming from outside of the "owner" of the project:

http://www.macieira.org/~thiago/qt-s...r.relative.png

Similarly, if it were possible to create a fully OSS SFOS device as a proof of concept, hypothetically, one might see more interest from other manufacturers, if they had the capability to create skunkworks projects to try it out without having to try enter into complicated closed source license agreements and similar.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Ok, here is exactly my problem:

and

So, Qt is fully open, and receiving the many benefits of open source. Yay! But, I would also argue that if the Qt company were to die tomorrow, Qt dies with it. There's an enormous amount of inertia behind Qt right now, so it wouldn't die immediately, but I just don't see how the project works without the company standing behind it.

Yes! But doesn't this really apply to any project?

I do understand that there are many, many benefits to open-source code. But what I'm seeing is that fully open-source efforts produce Nemo-like projects, while commercial organizations that mix open and closed source produce Sailfish-like projects. Yes, we had the death of the N900 and Maemo, the death of the N9 and Meego, and in the fullness of time we'll probably have the death of Jolla and Sailfish. All commercial software projects are mortal. But in all that time, with the rise and fall and rise again of all these commercial platforms, it doesn't seem like any fully open platform has gained any sort of success...

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Have you ever heard about Android?........

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

I don't think Android quite fits the definition of "fully open platform". It's pretty close though; and similar enough to the way Jolla is developing Sailfish for me to consider them as congruent business models...

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Android itself without the Gapps (Google apps) is fully open.....
Edit:
Android Open Source Project (AOSP)
https://source.android.com/

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

If Qt company dies, somebody will buy it and the project continues in some form as there is demand and benefit for it. When project grows big enough, it usually doesn't disappear completely if it's not considered to be obsolete. Ie. Symbian wasn't saved by open sourcing it. Using open sourcing to salvage dying proprietary projects almost never works, as they don't have a robust community behind them and generally people want to take part actively from the beginning when there is something new to accomplish instead of jumping into bandwagon when failure is already evident and product has lost it's momentum.

I'd say no, it doesn't. Projects differ and it's a bit different thing to develop something for project that feels like going forward (ie. that is available in commercial product instead of trying to reverse engineer and hack it into some device that's not designed for it). When people are paid to do the boring stuff it happens, but not many do such things in their spare time especially if there's a feeling that things are not really going forward under the hood.

So, I don't see open sourcing Sailfish as a bad thing. My point is that it has to be done right, not in some hasty dumping just for the sake of open sourcing it. AFAIK this is why some parts of Sailfish are yet to be opened.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

And yet it while most Jolla users boo it, it's more opensource than Jolla and Jolla somehow benefit from it with apps for android.
Do you remember MohammadAG that started n900's CSSU that actually led to updates of n900 till today. He is now making patches for Android.
So even if there are few devs contributing to open-source, still there is more benefit than none. And i remember N900 era here when there when half of this forum were devs contributing and rewritting closed source, adding patches and cool apps. But they are gone now and jolla lost them. And if someone doubts the opensource and what community can do it, you can see the openrepos as an example of how he is wrong.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Oh, another example is whatsapp that uses opensource xmpp but is closed source. If someone would not make 3rd party libs and not opensource them there would be no whatsapp on n900/n9/jolla.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

It depends of what you call "acceptable mobile hardware". You have the GTA04 and soon the Neo900 which (will) run on open drivers (at the exception of the GSM modem). About your utopia of developpers, look a little on the Neo900, it's a reality, but only because of the nature of this project and this device.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

zogG I agree with u for benefits that opensource could bring,even if,as someone said, probably they would not act like game changer,in this moment. the other things we have to deal with is that jolla has ti earn money and thats the real matter why they have developed sailfish os,apart philosophical and marketing question,and we cant blame it for that,can we?
red hat and some other open-source company, are white flies , they were brave and smart but we dont have right to blame who didnt feel to take that risk. I would be happy if they will open some parts, but i am not pretending it,not in this part of story. and without something that bind user to you (ui) you could be kicked away from some bigger player that, with more resources, use your code...

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

What about https://puri.sm/ ?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

You see I don't say that you have to be opensource. I do use closed sourced (had blackberry till last week, nvidia drivers and etc). and i do respect the choice of not opening closed source.
What i don't like is that from beginning Jolla positioned themselves as they would continue what Nokia did but "in proper way". That they talk about opensource a lot and use it as PR. They talk community and stuff. But mostly none of it is true. Today even MS opensource more stuff, they do hackatons and so on. It's just something to get, as was told before, free devs. But it should be mutual. And that disturbs me.
I think if they want to be opensource they should be, if they don't - they should shut up about it and do not make this cheap PR and promises everytime and be closed sources.
To sum up: my problem with Jolla is not that they mostly closed source, but that they promote themselves as "open", community friendly, while they are not and even less friendly and communicating than any closed source company nowdays including MS. For me opensource is not only code you can see, it's something more, it's more of point of view and i hate when someone just sweeping legs on it and use it as cheap PR.
But stay tunned, more info is comming soon...

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

ok i definitely agree with u in this sense. they abused of words like community and opensource. without any doubt...pr stands for public relations?

however i am waiting for a thing. i asked to them some months ago if they are gonna release nexus 5 2.0 rom with Camera and other things (original Camera) working. they show it on mcw2015...if they will not released it, it means they only want to take home something from community,without giving nothing of their property.and i will be angry

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

There are, even with opensource BIOS. They are not the latest and top laptops of nowday, but Jolla Phone is not as well :)
And no one asks to overreact and opensource all drivers and blobs. those parts community who really cares can work on(as was done on a lot of N900/maemo parts), but we are talking about OS itself. And there are a lot of opensource OSs(Tizen, webos/LunaOS, linux itself).
Just think of that if Linux would not be opensource, there would be no your favourite Jolla at all.

P.S.
And if we think of it. Human got to space and we now have self-driving cars only because of collaborating knowledge and that we continue from where people stopped and not start from scratch everytime (maemo->meego->jolla->what's next?). And that you can be skeptic and talk about money, but you can as well think about Jonas Salk and polio vaccine and what one person did to humanity.
My point is not that everything should be free and opensourced, but as told before, it shouldn't be closed if there is no reason for it to be.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Am on a nexus 5, running cutespot and it seems to randomly decide to stop playing my music and the cover goes grey. When I go back to it i reopens the application.

Is this a taste of things to come? Because if so bye bye Sailfish.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Is this article still valid?
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/...s-necessary/1/
Have AOSP improved lot since this article?

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Not sure about all I read here but I do believe (maybe this is a hope :p) that Jolla have good intentions, good willingness but have difficulties to implement.
They usually delay things because it usually takes more time than expected (and open-sourcing is one of them). And I think this is a mainly due to a lack of resource. (Another problem could be some constraints from their financing partners, from their board...?)

At the end, they desperately need more arms and/or more money. The first problem can be tackled with open source in a way. But to become helpful, it needs to be properly organised: that is how it works in other companies using open-source.
And they do not have (spend) much time to do that better-organisation unfortunately, even though some inside the company do spend part of their energy in helping doing so. And consequently, it takes time to improve...
But probably it is difficult to manage limited resources when you struggle to survive.

A second point I wanted to make is that as a consumer (I am very far from being a dev and not even working in something close to IT), I am still a fan of open-source for several reasons, but main ones are two:
- I tend to trust more open source system because some people at some point will read the code, and this is linked with the second advantage
- the community. People tend to be more helpful and prone to share information in open source community.. And that includes people inside the main company: I tend to think that the people we know better inside Jolla are the ones which are fan of opensource. That was probably the same at the time of Nokia.

However, I do not think as others, that open-sourcing SFOS will change many many things. For devs, that could help develop their own little patches. But it will take time before it makes a big difference for end-users. Because the level of QA is not the same for a little patch, written quickly by a dev, and for a Jolla developper.
And I am not sure that Jolla would accept all sort of customisations because it helps a couple of users at the risk of disrupting their own image and system.

The last point is for what is already open-source in SFOS. That includes office and the browser. It took some time before contributions came to office. And the browser is helped by one or two guys. However, it is hard to conclude that there were a lot of helps from the community, even if there were many complaints about those 2 applications.
And I think those examples were used quite a lot inside Jolla to justify not to open source quickly their system: why to spend now a lot of resources in open-sourcing while it will only please some tens of users, that complain but never contribute!
(I am not justifying that, only a matter of explaining)

EDIT: Some after thoughts, probably the arrival of Ubuntu touch is now giving more incentives to act quickly in open sourcing SFOS. As explained above, the fact that SFOS is 'pure' linux and (partly) open-source is part of their PR so they need to react before losing that :)

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Ask Cyanogen. :)

(my only experience with cyanogen was to install it on my wife's old Nexus 7, as Android updates had made it unusable. I was vastly, vastly better than what it replaced and exended the life of the tablet, so far, indefinitely)

(EDIT I also have good, but old, experience of non-cyanogen, AOSP based ROMs on old Android devices, again that extended their lifetime by a good year or more - eg. original HTC Desire, still usable and used by kids as an emergency phone)

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

Indeed, for me personally it would be great, sitting on 3 Jolla Phones, to be assured that Sailfish development continues in that sad case.

Only we have a hen / egg problem here:
From a business point of view, opensourcing your product would be rated as admission of total failure and equal financial suicide if it was your only product.
It has historically been done when products failed miserably to grab for the last straw or get rid of a burden... Google Wave, Symbian, WebOS, i am looking at you for causing that estimate within investors rows.

But yes, not opensourcing led to technological backslide in the past.

Not opensourcing even after fail, means the product still has some value for the company.

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

So ignoring the discussion on the merits of open source (at a time when even competitors such as MS at least start to show an understanding of it).

The problem is that the competition is catching up. Ubuntu, Android, Firefox OS all seem to have a larger % of opened components than Jolla has. I'm not a heavy user of any of these other platforms, so if someone can correct me, for the better. These platforms combined have > 80% of the global smartphone market share.

This is why I keep saying: the default should be to open source. That's what _all_ the competition does! In this day and age I don't understand why would anyone create yet another closed source platform. It would be like shooting themselves on the foot!

It used to be that Maemo/Jolla was actually more free software (i.e. GPL :) ) and open source community friendly than Android ("throw it over the wall") or Ubuntu (e.g. CLA). But the Jolla of today, instead of having improved on this, seems to have:
- Completely stagnated at the level of openness, which seems about par with Nokia-times levels,
- An insane fear of the GPL3, which, IMO, is incompatible with a company that pretends to be "open".

What I fear most from Jolla is not that they will dumb down the interface, or whatever.

What I fear most is that they'll become the single LEAST open source mobile operating system in the market.

And what I would welcome most is someone to correct me. :)

Re: First thoughts about the (pre) Sailfish OS 2.0
 

This is because you cannot use open sourcing to save dying platform. Open source should be there from the beginning and it needs robust community behind it, which requires some good faith instead of cynical infighting and clinging on to every single mistake/wrong/annoyance possible. Which is why I'm currently very skeptical if open sourcing would make any difference with Sailfish.

Another point of view is that open sourcing closed bits is something more than just changing labels in some papers. You need to know exactly what you are open sourcing, you need to be 100% sure there are nothing infringing other licenses and doing that research does cost time and at times money. Do it wrong and you end up in court and bankruptcy. On top of that, you need to have a way to organize everything related to that code, contributions, feedback etc etc. or whole open sourcing will result in utter failure and more "they cannot even do that right"-comments here and abroad. Still, they promised to open source many things and I do believe they will do it. Patience is a virtue.