Rekindle the community spirit?

asked 2020-05-24 17:52:48 +0200

szopin gravatar image

Over the years it seems Jolla forgot its community, corporate partners are the main focus for a while now. Correct me if I'm wrong but first coding competition from tmo had some jolla provided jollas as rewards. It's been 6 years from last open sourcing efforts, any chance we can get back to that? Corp clients surely understand that opening the UI doesn't make them more susceptible to attack, but less? All kinds of 'gnu'approved (or likely so) projects appeared recently and they all go ubports it seems(or pure)? Don't think coding competition will be enough to borrow some of that talent, but sfos is losing vs an unmaintained (financially) offshoot of a previous commercial project, makes one think. Dear Jolla, what are your plans to rekindle the community spirit?

p.s. what brought this question was https://www.rubdos.be/corona/qt/rust/tokio/actix/2020/05/23/actix-qt.html there are still people out there that see value in sfos outside of the 'muh closed UI', but pretty sure we could have a lot more newcomers if only Jolla spent a little bit of their efforts in inviting them, 6 years ago this community was much more lively

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5

My perception is the "community spirit" brought Jolla close to a financial collapse while working together with commercial partners saved them financially.

ossi1967 ( 2020-05-25 09:49:03 +0200 )edit
2

Touche, but with no community forget openrepos and jolla/sfos is... totally broken, harbour limitations make the system impossible to use, except gov issued dumb phones that do almost nothing

szopin ( 2020-05-25 11:00:18 +0200 )edit

maybe community spirit brought them close to collapse but then why are so many waiting for or have ordered the Pinephone? Will this be successful because completely open not half hearted as SailfishOS?

danfin ( 2020-05-26 11:41:05 +0200 )edit
3

@ossi1967 You make it sound like a binary choice, either community spirit or commercial partners. They're not mutually exclusive. There was a small but vocal minority demanding full open sourcing of the entire stack. Most of them gone. I personally can live with parts being closed source, and I think the majority of users and developers for the platform can live with that. But that changes completely if you're putting the platform effectively in maintenance mode and stop communicating.

Yes, they've managed to get Android support up to v8, and that's a GREAT feat, but also essential for survival. Yes, they've implemented encrypted /home, integrated VPN, added support for corporate WiFi. All very nice, but also essential to survive having corporates as clients.

But as a normal user, it's getting more and more annoying to use the phone as a daily driver. The native browser is horribly outdated and there's no commitment to maintain it. It also regressed hard w.r.t. video playing. The android layer has slowly gotten better, but still sometimes chews through your battery if you don't kill the entire android container (hello gps), still swallows notifications sometimes, and has many more integration issues (networking, bluetooth, filesystem, etc), making many apps hard or impossible to use.

Not many regular users are willing to put up with all that. Developers have a bit higher tolerance, but are now more and more confronted with an aging platform, no trustworthy roadmap or progress information, a often overly restrictive harbour policy. And. No. Communication. It's gotten now so bad that some apps are even distributed as Flatpak. On a phone! Good luck with your memory footprint..

I've hacked on a few new and existing apps, but due to this situation found myself unmotivated to continue with them. I strongly doubt my next phone will be Sailfish. And that's a tough choice after N900, N9, Jolla1, Intex AF, Xperia X and XA2.

accumulator ( 2020-05-30 10:00:14 +0200 )edit