This is the biggest lesson of the Jolla story. Openness is a very dangerous policy - it's great when everything's going well, but when things get tricky your customers will damn you if you tell them and damn you if you don't. #

The most disappointing thing for me here is that the age of the craftsman unassumingly making great things with skill and getting respect for it is gone. It's the age of the salesman now. It doesn't matter what may be best for *you*, because everyone's opinion matters, the customer is always right and the salesman is the best at massaging opinion. This is why the US is winning - and the Finnish psyche doesn't stand a chance.

This is an interesting view, less harsh and more reasonable than the bile in this thread. I think it's a bit unfair to blame the sailors for policies enforced by the investors though. I'm sure they would have loved to have found someone who would give them $50m to produce only GPL code, but the deal they struck is better than nothing. This will rear its ugly head if they do close, because I bet they won't allow what they view to be their assets to be open-sourced then either without some serious persuasion.

Oh come on now, you can criticise Google and Apple for a lot, but there's more to their products than just salesmanship. Apple have excelled in selling what is undoubtedly a high quality product that is easy enough to use by the masses. Google have sold an open sourced product that has more power, customization and control for users. Both companies saw areas where they could compete and both did so successfully. Jolla on the other hand still don't have a clue what they are trying to do with Sailfish. We've seen so many changes in strategy it's beyond a joke. First they talked about cracking China, then they talked about doing hardware/software together, then they tried selling to mobile operators, then they tried to crack India - who knows what they will try next. Assuming they even get funding - if Jolla try to go it alone, they will fail again.

The Sailfish OS patient is close to death. If Jolla (or whoever takes it over) - then the only way to revive the patient won't be with minor tinkering, it's going to require a complete change. At this stage, there is very little to lose in opening sourcing Sailfish.

I don't see a reason to stick so much to Tizen's past - does that really matter to market or average customer which OS/company had more glorious history? Mobile phones from Nokia had a great history, but where are they now? Huh?

But if you want to dwell into the past, then let's go.
I see Samsung's strategy as more far-sighted than Nokia had. I remember the the times when Samsung phones were not widely known and popular. At that time you could pick up a Samsung phone with Symbian, Windows Mobile (and later Windows Phone), Android and their own Bada OS. Samsung was trying many different options at the same time instead of betting almost everything on one platform like Nokia did (Symbian, then Windows Phone). That way, when it was clear that Android is taking the lead, Samsung could quickly go that way, scale up while droping those platforms that didn't have a future (Symbian, Windows Phone) and focusing on new promising ones to become a significant player on the mobile devices market in the end. Even though they became mostly Android, they haven't stopped working on the possible future alternatives. Tizen came as an evolution of SLP (Samsung Linux Platform) with some parts borrowed from Meego. Start wasn't impressive, it was in fact mostly disappointing, but they are improving.

It's easy to state, that Samsung could have put more effort on Tizen, as they are a big company and Tizen could do better, but Nokia was also (still is) a big company, so why they did not put more effort and resources on Maemo and Meego? Why Nokia had such a big delays in releasing the first Meego device (before Feb 2011). And in the end was it a real, pure Meego or more-like Maemo 6 with Meego compatibility?

Finally, so what that Samsung is a giant? Is it Samsung's fault that they grew so much as a result of running a successful business. People often repeat that Nokia started from rubber and paper. Do you know how Samsung started? Company was founded in 1938 and it wasn't easy to run a company in the first years under Japanese occupation, then during Korean civil war in 50s. Even having such hard start they've prevailed, developed and became a global player and leader in some areas. If you dig deeper the history of Samsung is no less interesting than history that Nokia had.

That's the past, but it's really not important to mass customer. Average customer doesn't really care if product he uses was made by a big corporation or a small startup. What matters is the product and what it offers to him/her as a customer.

It's a fact that Tizen become 4th smartphone platform, an important smartwatch and smart TV platform. Tens of milions devices sold in total with Tizen (compare that to tiny ~30000-50000 Jolla phone sales). People by shouting at TMO that "Tizen is a piece of crap without future" won't cover the above facts.

Instead of constantly looking at the past and thinking "what if", look at the future and help to shape it.

That's the power of leveraging a known and visible brand.

Of course not, but it's salesmanship that buffs up the good side and distracts from the bad. We say that people don't realise that app stores are anti-competitive, or that they're been stalked for advertising hints, but that's not strictly true. They've been convinced that those things aren't important, and even that anyone concerned with them is to be looked down on.

With salesmanship, all the points you state could be turned around into facing challenges against the odds etc etc. We don't even know how to take failure anymore unless it's dressed up this way. Successful people fail sometimes. Apple got bailed out by Microsoft. Google buzzed/waved/plussed. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying/selling.

What depresses me most about Jolla is that even now, when they appear to be at death's door, they talk about providing an alternative to iOS and Android. They do not have, never have had, and will never have any chance of doing that. If a third consumer phone OS ever gains a significant market share, it will come from a giant company like Microsoft or Samsung, because a company like that can afford to lose money making phones for many years, until they somehow crack the market. Even if Jolla comes up with some fantastic features for Sailfish, which are so clearly superior to iOS and Android that Jolla phones start selling briskly, those features will quickly appear on Android phones. If Apple can't keep Samsung from poaching its IP, then Jolla certainly can't. For Jolla, trying to crack the general consumer market for phones is futile.

I would suggest that they should try to find a much smaller, but potentially profitable market which is not large enough to interest the big players. I think they should build a device that is targeted at computer professionals. The key differentiator would be that this device is meant to be a second mobile device. The use case would assume that the user has with him a primary phone, iOS, Android or whatever, and the Jolla device is a second mobile device which provides enough utility to be worth having with you even though you have a regular cell phone too. To make it worthwhile to carry two devices, you optimize the Jolla device software to make it an excellent device for managing remote computers. This is the main reason I still carry my N900 around - for my job, I occasionally get phone calls telling me that there are problems with our computers or some software at work. I am "on call" 24 hours a day in this sense. And if I get such a call when I'm at a restaurant, or walking to work, or in a park, I need to be able to interface with remote machines, see what's going on, and fix the problem. The N900 is good for that, and had it been designed explicitly for that purpose, it could have been even better.

If you make a device that is squarely aimed at system manager type individuals, many of them will be able to get their employer to buy one for them. This should help sales. Computers are absolutely ubiquitous today, so there must be at least hundreds of thousands of computer professionals worldwide who could find such a device interesting. These people have money, and their employers have more money, so you could build a fairly high-end device that had a healthy profit margin even at modest sales volumes.

You want to use the "second device" usage case to differentiate it as much as possible from regular cell phones (the primary device). Don't include a camera - the user already has one in his regular cell phone. No accelerometer, magnetometer etc. Don't pointlessly duplicate hardware that the user already has in his primary phone. Instead, put a big battery in the Jolla device, and make sure that the Jolla device can be used as a charger for the primary device. Many manufacturers sell portable chargers, so there must be a market for them. Users will not need a portable charger for their phone if the Jolla device has that capability, and it's a very nice feature for persons who travel a lot. Give the Jolla device two microSD slots, and make them hot swappable. You can consider making the device WiFi-only (assuming tethering with the primary device's WiFi signal), but if you do include phone hardware, make it easy to insert the SIM from the primary phone into the Jolla device. The phone use case is as a backup phone in case the primary phone dies.

Optimize the software for serious computer work, not fun. Forget Facebook, make sure ssh, vnc etc. work very well. Consider dropping Wayland for X11, but if you go with Wayland, make sure it can work as an X11 server. No fancy UI. No animations, minimal compositing etc. Those things just pointlessly piss away your battery. Try to build a phone your niece would *hate*. When you add fancy software features, make sure they are fancy *nerd* software features, like having the phone automatically mount its microSD cards on your home and work computers, via sshfs, when it detects the appropriate WiFi signal.

This approach means you don't have to worry about not having a competative app ecosystem. There's no need for half-assed Android compatibility. No need to sing the old song about "web apps" being as good as native ones now. Your killer "apps" are things like vnc which are already available for linux. You are building a pocket workstation primarily, not a game player.

Um....

They have said since from the beginning that they do not want to be a HW company, but a SW company. They produced spearhead devices to get something out. There is no change in that. Cracking China is of course another thing, but knowing how difficult market it is (especially for small players who can be robbed at will without fear of reprisal), it's no wonder they decided to shift the focus elsewhere as it turned out that the chinese only wanted to get their knowhow and ip instead of real cooperation. India seems more reasonable and they did succeed in finding partners there. Which is the irony, why their funding fails just when there actually are partners and revenue streams begin to emerge.

Everybody talks about "complete change" quite lightly. Maybe you can elaborate in more concrete form what you actually mean by that "complete change?"

I have already said several times.

Open source the damn thing. I think it's too late to save Jolla the company, but a chance exists for save Sailfish OS as a community run project.

"Complete change" is IMO something else than just "open source the damn thing." I was expecting some deeper technical flaws that should be addressed in that "complete change" (hinting that just about everything with Sailfish OS is wrong and bad) instead of yet another punchline that in itself doesn't really mean much. Open sourcing is and has never been a magic bullet to correct it all (if it did, there wouldn't be open source projects consisting of pretty awful code and/or technical choices) and it is known fact that if platform is dying, open sourcing never turns it around. IMO the suggested dual/tri-way licensing scheme in similar vein to Qt licensing would be a good way to go, but also investors need to be convinced of it.

As Sailfish is based on already open source code for quite big part, issues lie mostly elsewhere. That can be debated, but please, don't offer empty slogans as a solution to real or imaginary need of "complete change" in platform.