[News] Russia to help Tizen and Sailfish Developers

Yeah. Here's hoping Jolla gets in touch with the Minister / Ministry and gets this rolling! (Should be really helpful for the community, even if it is in an advisory capacity).

So they would be unwilling to help existing russian sailfishos developers continue their work? Seems odd that they wouldnt use people like yourself as part of that strategy, either from a training perspective or from an app development perspective

@r0kk3rz - I am guessing it could be because of the lack of funds - the Russian economy isn't quite healthy. We have no idea how much they would be willing to commit to this project. So I am sure they would want to invest in only tried and tested developers who have already proven their mobile development skills. Ofcourse, this is where Jolla can step in - if they can convince the Russian to work with them, they could offer alternate suggestions on the development strategy to be adopted. And perhaps others like @coderus could also be a part of this project and benefit ...

Oh, you don't have to worry about this. Russia may not have money for health, education, social purposes, but it always spending billions to scence, technologies projects, even if it's more likely to fail.

@coderus - Yeah, I guess that is true. When your president visited India some time back, he mentioned that Russia was working on its own open source unix / linux OS and had invited India to join in its development. But then didn't hear anything about it so far ... and I guess North Korea and China have beaten them to it. :) But they have the right idea ... we need viable, open source alternatives.

Thanks for the update. This tidbit was especially interesting - "Sailfish is almost an international company today. It is owned not only by Finnish, but also by Russian and Chinese shareholders. We hope that strategic Indian, Brazilian and South African investors will also join Sailfish soon."

As an Indian seeing this russian announcement about a Finnish company makes me Happy! BTW Nokia was the market leader in India . People who bought Jolla in India really wanted the Nokia gang to succeed.

Not to mention that russia has lots of great developers what could seriously help the app ecosystem.

Are you know Kasperkry Lab, Acronis, Parallels? What are you think where employer of this company live?

Your link is also avialabe in english: http://minsvyaz.ru/en/events/32670/ :)

Thanks for the update - the Russian initiative seems to be at a much larger scale than I thought. Hopefully this is fruitful and we see some real competition soon ...

This is why Jolla should be involved in this initiative from the start. I would add that what maybe peanuts to you (European or American), maybe a lot of money for Russians and Asians in developing countries. That's one of the reason why most freelance developers are from these countries.

@midnightoil Agree that this reported "news" is probably just cyber propaganda with litle (or no) benefir for SailfishOS..on the contrary, only grave dangers if reading too much into this..

@sifartech Jolla should definitely not get involved or participate in possible governmental propaganda nor take any sides in the eastern Europe conflict between Russia and EU/U.S nor seek funding based on such "news" sources..

@jjaone - Your strong views on this apart, if Jolla aims to be a global business these kind of government interactions might be unavoidable. This announcement is good for Russian Jolla supporters as it could mean they will have more apps to use on their phone - it's as simple as that. Like I have mentioned elsewhere, in BRICS and other developing countries government grants for such things are not really uncommon at all.

Politically, it is a serious issue. America / American business are slowly trying to change their business model to the "rent a software" model. The US government likes this - apart from the profits, it also gives them more control. Technology denial will take a new meaning - suddenly your software may stop working if your country gets into a tiff with the US, or the ebooks you have rented or bought may suddenly get wiped out automatically from your ereader or ipad. Not to mention that they will have access to any data generated / stored on the "cloud" - it makes spying so much easier when you willing store data on US owned servers. And so on ...

Not that the "buy a software" model would prevent any of that happening.

Let's just hope the current tensions between "the West" and "the East" spark a battle on who gives more funds to independent developers. I'd rather not like to see Jolla/Sailfish getting utilized by either side alone.

@JonasG - I am of the opinion that Jolla and its community should take advantage of the tension on both side and use that to fulfil its own agenda. Politics 101 ... :)

@pichlo - Yeah, open source would be best. But unless the softwares bought have a "kill switch" to destroy them, it does afford us users more control. Legally too, things would be in different level.

Paul Wallace - No to politics and then few posts about European Union.

FYI - in BRICS (and many other countries), scientific research and technological development is heavily aided by the Government. So culturally many of us from these country don't see anything wrong at all in this announcement or in accepting this money. And if Jolla wants to be a successful global business, it will need to find ways to accommodate the cultural needs of various countries while ensuring that they don't violate their core values in the process.

I'd imagine this is exactly what Jolla needs, to be able to license SFOS to other parties.

What do you care the licensee is a government, it means there will be money coming in the house, which I believe is needed in any company.

@juiceme We don't even know what the nature of the discussion was, so we don't know whether any government will license the OS. It could well be that Russia takes the code from sailfish.org and build its own OS from there.

And concerns about government involvement in the development of the OS are not unfounded. I think the Snowden revelations make that clear. It's not like the Russian FSB wouldn't do the same things the NSA are doing if they have the chance.

My point is: Jolla should provide some information about these developments, so that we can really form an opinion. I already saw a #stopjolla or something like that, so there's clearly some discomfort with this news. It could be that there's no problem at all, and that this will strengthen Jolla to everyone's advantage. If that's the case, Jolla can inform us about that, right?

We need this in every country on this planet. The development concerning privacy in Europe and US is at an extremely sad state. Despite the cruel Snowden-files, no governement really seems to care here - in case of France, UK and Switzerland they even work into the other direction (other countries probably as well). Our countries are no longer social-institutions, but business-institutions, where the individual person doesn't count anymore. I hope Jolla does everything to protect our privacy...but more I hope that people finally wake up and don't let our governements kill their rights!

Sure. Please go ahead and create a discussion on this and I'll chime in with my thoughts too. FYI - in BRICS (and many other countries), scientific research and technological development is heavily aided by the Government. So culturally many of us from these country don't see anything wrong at all in this announcement or in accepting this money. So where you and others see "politics", I as an Indian, just see another "government initiative" to foster the development of another technology. (And like any government initiative, this too will have a 50-50 chance of succeeding / fialing).

Maybe short enough to be discussed here?. IMO, confirmed news which might have affect on Jolla phone owners/buyers might be welcome. But from another POI we already have channels for these within this community, and TJC is more a QA service, but also tried to be used as a bug reporting platform, polling platform and HowTo guide already. Opinions?

@simo - A separate thread would be better. Anyway, as you pointed out, we already use TJC for discussion and polling too. So in my opinion, the current practice is good enough - let the community moderate itself. Some topics would be interesting to you, some to me. If it isn't interesting to us, we are not even going to bother to down vote it and just ignore it. And really irrelevant topics just seem to die their own death, from what I've observed.

"let the community moderate itself" Well that's true, and it's working :) Also, people disturbed by any news can always add tag "news" to their ignored tag list. However, posting unconfirmed news might not be a good idea - looking at the original source (personal tweet), this one doesn't qualify as "news" at this point.

In my experience, high-ranking politicians are always careful of their words. Jolla should try to contact him / his ministry and get a clarification.

Russia claims on channel 5 of Russian TV that they can be in Helsinki within less than 24h. So when they will pop in to Finland they can decide if they want use Sailfish or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KGa9baVh2k

Reading the various articles on this subject, I too felt that this was a personal opinion of a Minister who is an advocate for open source. And that is why Jolla should get in touch with the Minister with their ideas on how to best achieve the stated goal of creating incentives for, and aiding, Russian developers to create apps for Sailfish (and Tizen).

@cropas it does not take 24h, there's a direct train from st. Petersburg to Helsinki four times a day and the trip takes just a tad over 3 hours :)

for T-90 tank, not train

Coming by train is lot better; it is more comfortable, quicker and energy efficient. (do you have any idea what the mileage for T90 is!)

Also for some reason the general reception is much friendlier in the travelling-by-train scenario... :)