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.