All the negative stuff I've heard has been about the way they've taken what they wanted from Mer and gave nothing back, which seems silly because UP sounds very immature, while Mer has a long pedigree. I've seen Ubuntu Touch fans dismiss Sailfish because of the closed source parts, which is also silly.

It feels a lot like Gnome vs KDE all over again. Sometimes I think the OSS community is its own worst enemy. If it can't work together, then it'll lose mobile like it lost the desktop.

Many people chose OS as "because not android or iOS", while it should be "why ${foobar} OS.." instead

Remember the catch exception. Or you might segfault...

I voted in the last two general elections according the same principle.
Not my preferred way but sometimes inevitable. Desperate times etc...

Yeah, perhaps I understated it a bit, definitely not as much discussion as Sailfish by a long way though. It's also lumped in with all the other "alternatives" whereas Jolla/Sailfish has its own category under OS/Platform.

Just struck me as odd, since UP has actually managed to release more devices than Jolla. Not sure how they compare on software updates though. That's still the thing that impresses me most about Sailfish, for all its little bugs and faults Jolla has provided first class security updates and regular feature updates.

I feel your pain, hopefully one day we will have proportional representation! Until then, we play the the "least bad option" game, which is often no real choice at all.

If you read the press release, you'll notice that no investor has left, but the investment was postponed for whatever reason.

Jolla's new address:

Fredrikinkatu 42
00100 Helsinki
Finland

They are almost next to the location at the center of Helsinki where Jolla Phone was launced two years ago.

How is it related? I was talking about choosing something because you like it and not because you dislike the other options.
there is huge difference between choosing something you like or choose the less hateful one.
I do not use Linux because I hate Windows, but because i like it. i relate myself to it's ideology. I like my distribution (funtoo) because i find it simple and adjustable for my needs, though I can tell that there are a lot of other good distros out there (i even switched servers at my previous work place to Debian and not Gentoo/Funtoo). So it's all about usefulness and taste and options you have/this distro can provide you. Same with Sailfish. Currently the ecosystem, functionality and even UX (which they made more like Android with 2.0 and all the patches people add e.g. powermenu is in android and was on maemo, meego long time ago) are not better even if not worse than Android. (Do not start talking about how it's real linux, as it's phone after all and if it doesn't give you an option to do what most phones do today, compiling own kernel would not help you here or give you any advantage, as it's bonus feature but not the main functionality).
So again — choosing just because "not Android or iOS" is not the best way of making the choice.

Not used it, but judging from several videos and reviews, the biggest reason for me is the work flow. On Sailfish it's very effective and built around access to running apps, but Ubuntu takes very different approach which of course is not bad think per se. I just don't like the idea that running things are hidden somewhere opposed to seeing and having access to them from default view. IMO Ubuntu won't be a successor to Harmattan but it's completely different thing. Some may like it, some don't. But Canonical does have more stable financials behind it as they have other business areas to support ventures in mobile and consumer world.

No. They lost the main prospective investor (€10m), meaning that this round of financing (selling shares in the company) would certainly fail. This forced it to be postponed, Jolla into bankruptcy protection, and the 'temporary' redundancy of most of their workforce as they effectively have no cashflow whatsoever and can't meet wage bills or other basic costs. What isn't stipulated is whether this was an investor that already has a stake in the company or not (which is largely irrelevant). Aside from the practical impossibility of finding a replacement investor or investors in a reasonable timeframe (or at all?), the withdrawal of the primary investor in a funding round usually causes others to withdraw too.

In other words, they're dead in the water until such time as new investors come in, or they get emergency loans which would need to be underwritten (or made) by Finnish government / NGOs - I suspect Russia has decided that they have bigger fish to fry atm.

If they can't raise substantial new investment, then they're likely to be placed into administration and sold as a business / IP, or stripped and liquidated as soon as the loans run out.