Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Sure, I can try asking Stskeeps about it.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

OK, Stskeeps said that so far it's closed (UI and core applications) but what's going to be in the future isn't known. I take it, that with the release the stuff will be closed, which is sad. So Firefox OS will present itself with fully open stack, and Sailfish will be at a disadvantage.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Like I said, bait and switch.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Switch what? AFAIK it was never the intention to make the core apps open. I'm not allergic to closed source software. I'd like to see the option to swap the closed bits of software (or any bit, for that matter) for alternatives. That's freedom. But closed source is fine with me, if it provides a good UX.

Firefox and Ubuntu might be fully open, and I do prefer that (typing this on Firefox on Kubuntu), but I don't think Firefox will provide a very good UX nor high-end platform like Harmattan and Sailfish; webtech is just too limited for that. Ubuntu might do well though, given that they use a very similar platform as Sailfish/Harmattan.

I am allergic to closed protocols though.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

They were ambigous about future plans and still are. But in short term it seems to remain closed. I personally find it troublesome for several reasons. Harmattan mistakes shouldn't be repeated (unusable code since it's closed when the platform is abandoned), no effort sharing and etc. Nemo for example can't benefit from core applications of Sailfish if they'll remain closed.

In the best case, it would be good to get Jolla to express a will to open stuff eventually and to make a roadmap for that. In the worst case it will remain closed.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

WOW, your summary is quite negative, given what I have read on IRC, while following your conversation with Stskeeps.

http://pastebin.com/bhxnjm1q

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Not negative, but concerned. In short Stskeeps said that now things are closed, and future is unknown, but it's not easy to make things open. If you want, make a formal inquiry to Jolla about opening things. Did I sum it up right?

You can assume a few things (but again, these are just assumptions):
1. At the release core applications and UI will remain closed.
2. Jolla is undecided yet about future.

Why I find it concerning:
1. No sharing of effort with Nemo about UI and applications. Ideally I'd even prefer Nemo and Sailfish to merge into one. Or Nemo to become what Fedora is for RHEL (note all of them are open). With Sailfish being closed - it's impossible.
2. Harmattan pitfalls risk.
3. Disadvantage in comparison to fully open systems (Firefox OS).

I'm not trying to be negative, I'm trying to analyze the issue objectively.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

But isn't that situation lots of better than Android, Tizen, Harmattan and Maemo?

Core and MW are developed in the open and are open source.

And I don't see that much of benefit for Nemo if Sailfish apps would be open, as Nemo seems to move to own QML components. They still can share the middleware for example the email framework or social plugins. Just UI would be duplicate. But better a duplicate UI, as apps that don't fit into the UI/UX.

Thats where Nemo UI/UX will go: http://play.qwazix.com/grog/

Sure I can see your point that everything open would be ideal. But how should their product be successfull? Copycats would take it all.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Morpog: Success of the product doesn't necessarily depend on it being closed. Firefox OS is going to be successful to some degree. At least I hope it will.

The fact that Nemo needs a separate set of components isn't a good thing. It's caused precisely because Sailfish development is rather closed (even though Silica are supposedly open). And it's precisely the duplication of effort that could be avoided.

Developing an e-mail client is not trivial. Even if it's just a UI. It's a serious effort. Making two is going to be twice as hard. So I see completely no point in keeping that kind of stuff closed.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

this is indeed looking pretty good to me right now

http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

It looks worse with their whole Mir move. I really hope Sailfish will open up. It's by far the best option otherwise especially since they are going to use Wayland from the start.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

ooh for got sake... This is ridicilous discussion. Some geeks are to much old geeks. I have used Linux for 20 years and even me realise X11 is DEADEND!

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Why oh WHY ? ANOTHER set of components, seriously ?
Is

• Harmattan/MeeGo Qt Components
• Symbian Qt Components
• Fremantle Qt Components
• Silica
• Ubuntu Qt Components
• Controls (Qt 5.1)
• Cascades
• That old Colibri Intel thing
• Plasma Qt Components
• MeeGo touch & co

not enough ?

How is an application developer supposed to make a multi-platform application like that ?

I warn you, I have experience with porting Harmattan Qt Components and I'm not afraid to use them. :)

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

As stated by stkeeps and what u see in the current SDK we can expect Silica(biggest part of the UI) IS open source using BSD license. So to me it sounds more like some apps is closed, and thats very logical to me. If they want to sell licenses to others some must be closed. What else could they sell if not?

And btw I DO NOT prefer nemoUI and sailfishUI to merge. But yes core stuff like backend libs should share alot together like sharing/pluginapis etc.... But some of that should actually be merged in Qt project so it could be shared between BB/Ubuntu too...

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

my point is backward compatibility. access to that 20 years of development. and not via vnc. xwayland would do nicely, but they seem to have made a deliberate decision to cut off that 20 years of development.

at least we can stop talking about the contribution they're making to opensource now if it's all closed.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Open or closed is not the issue here. To me it's more important to get some solid Intel from jolla so you can make an active decision if this is for you, before you preorder and they are shipping. It's more important to get solid info than what the info contains.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Yes thats exacly how stuff works. KDE and Gnome will go same route in some year. Its only way to move forward and totally logical on embedded OS:es too...

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

yes it is trivial if tehy want to support closed crap protocol like exchange etc.. stuff that people wants.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

ROTFL first you dish wayland then you lobbying for an RIPOFF company that actually is using stkeeps libhybris and is NOT so popular company lattely in the FOSS world. Now who is biggest hypocrits ;)

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Welcome to the reality this has been said before but people doesn't seem to listen..

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

mikecomputing: I don't know about Jolla's business plans. But licensing Sailfish based on of its closed components doesn't sound like a good idea to me. But I can see that it can be challenging to come up with some sustainable approach.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

the distributions will be keeping x11 as a compatibility option for a long time to come. so i don't know if youre pretending not to understand, or you really can't grasp the arguments.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

But not ubuntu phone. Thats a lonely island with its MIR solution.
How should that be better than wayland, which everyone else supports as x11 replacement?

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

well, mir has an x11 compatibility layer.. i haven't checked the details of whether or not this is on their phone. i just assumed it was.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I like the mock-ups. But until Nemo will get a solid set of core applications such as e-mail client it will remain a prototyping tool and not a practical day to day OS. I would totally start using Nemo since it's fully open as soon as it will be practical.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Apparently you haven't been following all Mir stories & related discussions closely over the last few months.
I implore you to start doing that, & not just at Canonical-centric news sites or the most popular tech blogs -which usually have zero clue.
I won't go into to detail as-to-what I mean, as this thread has already been derailed more than enough...

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

if somebody asked me what FUD meant, i'd direct them to that post.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

This makes no sense, they had said the following (not verbatim) only a few mths back:
"Silica is open, only thing to be closed is most core/stock apps, some of those have proprietary code borrowed from elsewhere (e.g. aliendalvik), others don't.
But we wish to keep them closed so that we can license our flavour of Sailfish."

It absolutely confounds me that they're now saying that the entire uppermost layer is closed, at least for foreseeable future.
I'd been suspecting for some time that they were moving this way, it's silly, their original plan of having 2 versions of Sailfish made way more sense.
I'm very disappointed about this....

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Well, it was inspired by your regular FUD-infused posts, it's got to come from somewhere.
I will PM you in more detail about what I was talking about....

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

The way I understood it that Silica is open, but it doesn't mean the core UX will be open. Anyway, the details were rather scarce, so I won't make conclusions. Either way - something will remain closed and it's already negative, no matter what that is (and I'm not talking about any Android stuff and etc.). Either they'll open things up, or community should focus on Nemo more, as a fully open stack.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

If they reaffirm/commit_to Sailfish being 100% based on MeR/Nemo in all but the uppermost layers*, & clearly define that linkage, then it's not a big deal.
But if they continue to remain vague on that front, right up to release day, then I'm going to start on the kittens again...

*except for proprietary stacks like AlienDalvik ofc

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

i've just looked at the nemo status matrix and for the n900 it can make calls and send/receive sms. so..... maybe i'll install it and start contributing. thanks for the steer.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Yeah but they've only gone this way because the Sailfish_Alliance (remember that, WTF ever happened to it!?) has taken so freaking long to get off the ground.
If they had stopped "fart-arsing" around MONTHS ago, both projects could be working on the same UI/UX now, or very soon...

Just the UI? It's a big waste of resources for Jolla's Sailfish & Nemo, but especially Nemo, the entire community could be working with common components & UI/UX.
That way there's no messing around with porting apps between 2x platforms that are essentially supposed to be helping one another, not hindering one another in some way.
But as you said, so long as most of the important middle-ware remains exactly the same it shouldn't be a huge problem, but it's far from optimal.

That's why they were originally going to keep only "core/stock apps" closed, & license that version of Sailfish...
If Silica itself is completely open, then why the heck not use it as the basis for Nemo's UI/UX, instead of building completely new/separate components?

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

I don't agree at all, Sailfish should've been opened-up ages ago, or shortly after the 1st phone is released at the absolute latest.
It makes more sense that both projects are merged & have essentially the same code-base....
Jolla can still keep it's originally touted "commercial" flavour of Sailfish, a version that has mostly closed apps (including some closed ones from 3rd-parties).
But the rest should be left for a totally open flavour of Sailfish, one that's administered exactly like Nemo has been for ages now.
Or the code should be handed over to the Nemo project, & mostly/totally supplant the current Nemo code...
Which will (predictably) turn into a political ****-storm, and it never had to, if only they'd pulled their head out of their arse earlier.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

As I understand from what you all are writing the thing stops looking that good as it did for me in the past :(

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

It's never as good as the fanboys says. But it pretty damn good anyway because it's a new Os. All new OSes provided to us(the customers) the are pretty damn good in their own ways. Fear not!

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

A bit of rationale about why we've decided to go with new Nemo UI and seperate components:

UI is not something that can be done via commitee, well, it can, but the result will not be good. The Sailfish UI has a certain target and is designed by the Jolla chief designer. The only thing they could do was to throw code over the wall. This is not engaging for the community to create anything. It would lead to something like android, where all the community involvement is just cooking ROMs with different set of included apps.

We want to take nemo somewhere else. We don't want to move from a cheap Harmattan clone to a cheap Sailfish clone. It's GUI is a community effort and we want to experiment and do things that a commercial company wouldn't do for fear of general acceptance/market performance.

The hard part is not creating the gui for the apps, it's the logic behind it. Come over and help to create a functional set of core apps on nemo with the new UI set that's being cooked and you'll have the fully open stack you like.

And with the quality work of Jolla supporting our UI I think we'll have the best product possible within the "fully open" world.

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

qwazix: I get the need to be free to experiment without Jolla's tight control over their vision of the UI. But are the set of Qt components dictating the design of the UI itself? Aren't they just building blocks that still could be shared? Or they dictate some stylistic approach which you also don't want to be bound to?

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Yes, absolutely. For example qt-components on fremantle look like harmattan, and that is what prompted marxian to create a more native-looking set (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=85955)

Qt5 has qtQuick controls which are the building blocks you mention, and they are open. We will base our work on those. (If I'm not mistaken Sailfish Silica are not based on QQC)

Re: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
 

Qt Quick controls are documented as Qt Quick components for desktop interfaces. Are they useful for touch interfaces in this case?