This whole situation is quite bizarre.

When the stretch goal of supporting cards up to 128GB was announced, there were few very loud people that demanded this stretch goal to be pulled because of ideological reasons. But they didn't realize you cannot simply pull a stretch goal once it is announced, unless you refund all people that have contributed since the announcement.

Why is it bizarre? Because only these people raised their voice and therefore it was only their voice that was heard. The reason why the rest did not do the same thing is stated above - even though I also think the SDXC standard is ridiculous, it is not up to Jolla to change that and once again, you simply cannot pull a stretch goal.

What's worrying is the lack of clear leadership, capable of making unpopular decisions for the good of the company. I have been told about the lack of clear vision before (by Kaacz for example), but I always opposed the idea, because I don't think that other problems (lack of APIs in the store, libhybris) could be affected by them (SE Ericsson...). But this is really worrying, because they are basically shooting themselves in the foot. We might argue that it was unfortunate, announcing such stretch goal (it either should've been there from the beginning, or not at all), but once the decision was made, they must stick to it, no matter what.

It would have been much easier refunding those ~20 evangelists with the few bucks for the license, than misguiding possibly thousands of buyers and securing bad reviews in advance.

Regarding the SD card. I would guess that Jolla have more foss-fanatics relative the total number of users for the platform compared to Android/IOS/Windows Phone. Based on that Jolla is doing what many of its customers want (i.e. the ones actually buying the device).

This may be a bad decision when it comes to attracting new non-tech customers, but I fail to see why most of these customers would pick Jolla before any of the other platforms. I guess some people use Jolla based on the user interface, but I believe far more people use Jolla because of interest for foss/Linux.

True,that was valid before. Now they suddenly started to collect money again in some form of a undercover campaign.

They closed it so we shouldn't reach the goal and then open again right after again.

I feel deceived.

Well, it's called FOS-DEM for a reason.

(Haha, just read this on the wiki page: "The F (of FOSDEM) was added at the request of Richard Stallman.")

Count me in. If there has ever been a FOSS fanatic, it's me. Still, I need things to work. I can (and will) format cards as ext4 or whatever if I feel it's safe for the way I use them. However, if I get my hands on standards compliant SDXC cards that contain data, I need my Jolla to read them. Period.

I'm 100% sure the decision to withdraw the stretch goal, take the money and run has nothing to do with „doing what many of its customers want“. It were only a few people who kept the topic alive here and on TJC. Compare those few with the number of people who paid for the tablet. No, that can't be the reason.

My assumption is that they just re-calculated the business case and found the license fees for exFAT were too expensive. Now because its unpopular to announce features will be eliminated, they needed a story and remembered the old and long forgotten shitstorm about exFAT. Now they're not crippling the device by reducing features, they're making it even better by listening to the community. How cool is that?

If only it was that easy, we'd be having a witch-hunt, 'jolla trying to bribe foss advocates'/'jolla sides with micro$oft'/'jolla lies, does not listen to its users'/'jolla financially supports proprietary formats'/...
They had two conflicting goals with that stretch goal announced and the whole 'do it together' approach. With one-click solution I really hope the ones who were counting on it and can easily get it will not be the complaining side, while the foss advocates can go around and spread good word about jolla actually listening to foss, lets see what FOSDEM brings, dropping exfat could be a news?

No. Old micro SD readers can't read micro SDHC/XC. Old micro SDHC readers can't read/format micro SDXC cards.
SD/SDHC/SDXC Specifications and Compatibility
Wikipedia - Secure Digital Compatibility

Even if the micro SDHC/XC card is not formated at all, some old cards can't read them (so it is impossible to format, etc).

Please go back and read benny1967's post again. He was not talking about SD->SDXC, he was very specifically talking about SDHC->SDXC. And he is absolutely right, the only difference is exFAT support.

It is possible to compile exFAT support on Sailfish OS :
https://together.jolla.com/question/...#post-id-14155
https://code.google.com/p/exfat/downloads/list
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=92490&page=2
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=92490&page=4
etc.

and morals