Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

First hand info can be found here (warning : in finnish)
Päättäjätiedot is the list of board members / decision makers.

https://www.finder.fi/Matkapuhelimia...tiedot/2640873

if you want more detailed info (and have 5 € to spare) you could download the reports from the finnish chamber of commerce.

BTW on the same website there's no Jolla LTD to be found; i believe then this confirms Oy===LTD (For Finland at least, do not know about HK)

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

At least one of those has gone off to work for Jolla in the PR department... In fact, I'd take a guess and say there are probably more of the past Jollapologists working for Jolla now than there are Jolla employees who've stuck with them through the years. I think the major turning point came around the time they lost the godhead Marc Dillon. Now all the big boys are just some extremely dull business people who don't care about any of the ideas behind Sailfish or Jolla (or being 'unlike'), they just want to make money.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

I beg your pardon, make money? From what? jolla has been on a steady minus since its inception

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

In all fairness, he did not say they make money. Only that they want to.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Less tablets are more tablets. Doesn’t make sense to me.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

I indeed only meant to say that the new people in charge are no longer the charismatic types who come to community meetings and genuinely (seem to) care, instead they're typical talking heads only interested in making money, no matter how. Hard to cheer for big business (or at least harder, anyway).

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Today, they're the only non-IOS/non-Android OS that's still around, and still far from being big business. They need to make money to survive, and apparently they're moving in the right direction, but they're not there yet. They barely survived their near-death experience.

Yes, Mark Dillon had charisma, but the current management team at least has stamina and perseverance.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Oh, another steve jobs cult follower?
Why can't we just have a hundred boring engineers who do their job?
What's with that American charismatic-leader urge?
Nokia became Nokia without a charismatic leader, and hundreds of other companies, did too.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

You're wrongly reading a lot of things into a simple statement, and it seems you've completely missed what the preceeding 10 posts were about. There's no longer a godhead, so there's no longer anyone to look up to to, no longer anyone to cause blind faith. This says nothing whatsoever about Jolla's qualities, and is a negative value statement about charismatic leaders and their followers.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

You are absolutely right! I totally overlooked Mark's departure and did not make the obvious connection between that and the virtual disappearance of Jolla apologists. I never gave a hoot about Mark (if anything, I considered him a distracting element) and I forgot that religious followers need a Messiah. I simply assumed that most dreamers simply sobered up. But I think you are closer to the mark, pun intended.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Could it also be related to sentiment about the new owners and not having the benefit of the doubt any more?

And also the fact that purism's librem5 is the "new hope"?

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Is it stupid of me to ask whether or not this move will produce products that are trustworthy? Too early to tell?

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Not sure if I would call it stupid but certainly unattractive. That question is what this thread is all about :D

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

And yet no definitive answer. Imagine that.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

It's certainly doesn't generate much trust to have Kremlin involved in any way in anything. However, Jolla's licensing practice AFAIK gives the licensee full access to the source code of Sailfish OS. In that regard hiding some backdoor in the product would be more or less stupid idea in the first place. However, because manufacturer can add their own stuff, it boils down to question whenever do you trust either Jolla or the device manufacturer.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

there's no stupid questions; just stupid answers ;)

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

This also explains the reason for them to rename the OS; perhaps they will use the MER middleware as a basis for something else.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

That is the big elephant in the room after this deal. The thing is: no one can tell by now.
From a technical point of view, Jolla's licensing model allows it's partners to access the SFOS source code, make adjustments and then use the resulting product. Some of those improvements can be backported into SFOS. So it is possible to implement backdoors unnoticed since a big part of SFOS (Silica) is not open source, meaning you can't review new changes for such implementations.
On the other hand, there is a big difference between Jolla Oy (which develops SFOS) and the Jolla Ltd which is the business construct for licensing SFOS and from which Russia Telecom now owns the majority of shares. If they get any influence (and if they do, how much of it) over the SFOS development with this deal is hard to tell. Only Jolla can tell, but probably won't. That's why there are all those wild speculations here.

Let's look at that matter from the perspective of motivation:
The first licensing deals in Russia for SFOS were to obtain an independent mobile operation system for governmental use which is not associated with the USA or China. With this motivation, you're target probably isn't to implement backdoors, but to make the system more resilient and safe to be protected against foreign intelligence services.
Now with the Russia Telecom deal and the focus towards consumer market, this changes. Seeing Russia's tendencies towards internet censorship and crackdown on privacy-friendly tools, I'd say there is a fair chance for adding backdoors as surveillance measures. This would probably affect the russian SFOS at first, but unfortunately it's not infeasible to find it's way back into SFOS itself (and be it unintended when someone forgets to remove it from a backport).
Again, only Jolla can tell about possibilities or countermeasures (if they are not bound by some kind of NDA). So in the end, all we can do now is wildly speculating and maybe look for (in-existent) alternatives.
From my point of view, the best way for Jolla to counter all those wild speculations and fears about russian influence would be to finally move all SFOS components to an open source license, so everybody can check the changes.

One final thought: We are arguing here about possible privacy violating implementations to our operation system in the future while it contains the unaudited closed source security sh*thole called Broadcom baseband from the very beginning.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

I was under the impression that these guys want to make their own downstream version. I think that should not affect sfos itself other than help it have money / dev resources.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

I brought this topic into the last Community Meeting. As expected, Jolla can't really comment on these speculations, since they are only speculations (what can they really say about it?). But James pointed out that the backports (improvements to SFOS components) from their licensing partners usually affect packages from the MER project, so they are already open source and can already be tracked and reviewed.

Regarding publishing the code of the yet closed parts of SFOS, Jolla's argument seems to be that they won't be able to handle additional stuff like reviewing commits and pull requests from the community. They also seem to be afraid of forks being made when they release the code.

You can read all in the Log of the meeting here, starting at around 08:08.
http://merproject.org/meetings/mer-m...08.00.log.html

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Seems to make sense to me.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Seems it is not called 'Sailfish Mobile OS RUS' anymore.
Is it bad or good? Not sure.
Russian mobile operating system begins a new stage of development under the Aurora brand

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Excepted.

Doesn’t mattar really. Sailfish left the great path when they didn’t refund it’s most supportive fans in the tablet scam. Then putin(via proxy Rostelecom) took over and went downhill from that.

Refund backers atleast to stay fair before going full Russian. Instead of 50Euro licenses you can’t transfer between devices.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Wow, that's a well-thought-out naming. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia...olution_mutiny )

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

I know, right...

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

If anything should cue an ominous foreboding soundtrack ...
it is most certainly that reference to the naming.

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Oh, those excepted mattars... yum!

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

Excepted?
/ducks

Re: Rostelecom investment in Jolla
 

You know. When a new manager comes along an wants to do it their way. Or If you buy something...you want do decide things.