Co-creation leading to co-development?
An obvious step up from how we are doing co-creation here on Together is to take an idea and factually co-develop, co-design, co-debug it, etc. There's a few challenges regarding that.
SailfishOS is currently built from:
Mer Core (open source, openly developed), http://www.merproject.org
Nemo Middleware (open source, openly developed)
Sailfish UI (closed source currently, not openly developed)
A hardware adaptation (typically closed source, full of 3rd party bits and pieces)
I believe personally that unless you can factually be open about plans, directions, during the development of open source SW, there's really not much worth in open sourcing it. Plus - a mobile stack is -big-
In addition to that, there is a challenge with UI and applications - especially a modern mobile UI:
- Is going to be heavily designer driven - as in, there may very well be a requirement to have an accepted design before your feature is merged
- It needs to be fluid, 60fps and you need to take care of your feature and be responsible for it
- It needs to have test cases and integrate well into a complex system
And that really complicates typical open source development methods.
I think that if we (as in Jolla) as a small company, work from the perspective that we start with co-creation of ideas, then work with contributors in these ideas and bug reports to focus where the real openness effort needs to happen, it'll help a lot.
What do you think? How can we do realistic co-development? Answers such as 'open source everything' is not what I'm looking for. It's easy to ask for openness, but it's hard to do in practice.
Here's one for thought:
- co-develop first on the most common pain points of a mobile UI - e-mail, calendar, browser comes to mind. Help nuture ideas into features and get them implemented.
Hi, I'm Carsten Munk, Chief Research Engineer at Jolla. Let's try to grow the skunkworks of Jolla and SailfishOS together. Use the tag 'skunkworks' for your ideas and thoughts. Rule #1 of skunkworks: stick to something that is not short term (rest of site is good for that), but is possible 6 months from now or beyond that. I believe that the best research department a mobile OS can have is a worldwide community of passionate contributors and users. Let's prove this theory right.
I'm not a developer, but in my humble opinion this is probably the most important topic here.
Nilux ( 2014-01-29 10:34:22 +0200 )editHope for (even) more openness from Jolla than Nokia was the single biggest reason for me to support jolla. So far I am pleased, and I hope I will have the same reason to buy the next phone too.
@Stskeeps: Hi, I have a suggestion for enabling more co-development, rather than just co-creation. I made it a Question here: https://together.jolla.com/question/38722/make-sailfish-oss-front-end-ui-open-source-but-not-the-ui-back-end/ I am happy to make it an Answer under this question if you think it belongs here more than where it is now. I would be very happy for any comment.
00prometheus ( 2014-04-14 05:25:52 +0200 )editUmm, “fluid UI” ... how is closing off the source helping with that? And if it does, are we going to get a fluid UI eventually? Because sailfish so far has been, sadly, everything but fluid.
mornfall ( 2014-12-02 17:30:14 +0200 )edit