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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 ((((

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.

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.

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:



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.