Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Unfortunately that doesn't come unexpected.

I think the problem is, that nobody nowadays wants to risk anything. All the manufacturers are not keen enough to offer another OS than Android (or iOS).

In mobile market the only chance to introduce a new OS successfully is, when you have a well known brand, a lot of money and the will to make both - Hardware and Software. Jolla only had the will to make Hard and Software. But they are to small to do it in a competitive way.

It is unbelievable that they nevertheless managed to make a phone and at least some tablets. And in my opinion they made a really great phone (don't know about the tablet, I fear I will never see mine), but that doesn't matter.

There were a lot of friends which said: Oh that's a great phone that you own. But in the end they all bought their next Android phone. Giving up their freedom and another chance to break through a wall of monopolism.

On the other hand there were a lot of people which bought a Jolla and always expected to have THE Superphone, which has all features of the Galaxies and iPhones in the world and all features should have been better implemented. I think they also have a joint guilt.

Well I'm really sad reading of the actual situation.
Probably I will buy another phone before it is to late. I don't see any reasonable alternatives on the horizon, so better to have a spare Jolla.

Hopefully i'm to pessimistic, therefore:

SAIL ON JOLLA!!!

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Oh come on, not another "it's the others' fault!"

If someone does not buy your product, it is not the buyer's fault. It is yours. It is your job to promote it, your job to persuade the buyers of its benefits, your job to beg, borrow or steal if necessary.

Jolla has failed in that job, plain and simple. They have produced a nice product with some potential but failed to realize that potential and, most crucially, failed to make it attractive. Simple as that. To continue blaming others is the same as admitting, "I have learned nothing".

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Analyzing reasons is not "it's other's fault." If there is no demand as manufacturers don't want to risk already slim margins (as majority of them generate losses anyway) it doesn't matter if your product is good or bad anymore. Only way to succeed would be to have backing of another big corporation, which never comes without strings attached. So yes, if Jolla ends up in bankruptcy, it's their fault as that they tried to do the impossible with support from community. Lessons learned:

- you need a big partner for continued funding
- communities won't help you generate that funding
- don't even try, you will fail
- after failure you only get public shaming and ridicule even from your own community

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

There is no dead body and you are already making a funeral.

Expect the best, prepare for the worst (Chinese proverb)

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

JulmaHerra, when your parents/spouse (sorry, I don't know your background) point out that you left a dirty spot when you were washing the dishes, do you also throw in a towel and exclaim, "I won't even try, I will always fail, all I get is shaming and ridicule"? Or do you try to learn from the experience and wash up better the next time?

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

...but you can try it as hard as you like, if the dirty spot is burnt-in.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Depends. If I get the feeling that result is the same no matter what or how I do it, then yes, I'll throw in the towel and do something else as I usually don't want to waste my time on futile attempts. IMO it's the only sensible thing to do in such circumstances as I have witnessed relationships where everything seems to be based on finding errors from things the other one does and bemoaning them as if they were the most important things in the world. I try to do my best not doing it with my wife, son and daughter, as I want to encourage them to try out things by themselves and offer guidance when they need it rather than wait for them to fail so I can ridicule and belittle them. "It's you fault and your fault only!11!" IMO is as nonconstructive as "it's all the other's fault!11!!" as they both concentrate on finding someone guilty instead of analyzing why and how certain things happened. I'm sorry, but I don't like the blame games, hence my little bit cynical remark.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Did you ever try to see it from the other side's view? If you consistently leave a dirty spot, then of course the response is always the same.

In this particular case, yes, you can say, "It's the bloody manufacturers, it's their fault, they are bloody cowards and do not want to risk anything".
Or you can say, "We have so far failed to persuade the manufactures to try our alternative, where have we made mistakes and how can we alleviate them?"

Which one is more constructive?

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Soooo... What do folks here expect to be the "next time"?

To my mind, Jolla was just about the optimal case for creating a new mobile OS, independent from the big guys. They started with a group of folks with deep expertise in mobile operating systems; they were able to build on the existing Mer infrastructure; they had a decent amount of startup funding; and they were explicitly following the trail already blazed by Google, by offering to license their OS on devices built by other manufacturers.

The concept looked _great_ to me!

So, what exactly are people supposed to learn from this experience?

My guess would be:

a) Manufacturers of mobile devices are now loathe to experiment with new OSs. Maybe Google's path is now dead; Samsung is playing around with Tizen, but that's probably because they want an OS that is completely controlled in-house. The Ubuntu phone is interesting, but doesn't seem to be aimed directly at challenging Android; they don't seem to be trying to license the OS to major manufacturers...

b) Openness doesn't give you an advantage. Apparently you don't need to be more open than Android; many, many more people seem willing to root an Android device, install CM, and develop their software on that, than to do anything with (say) a build of Mer or Sailfish, or something else not tied directly to Android.

I just don't see anybody examining this experience and saying: "We need to be more open! We need to get our OS onto more devices!" That just doesn't work. It'll be the opposite -- "We need to tie our software more closely to our hardware!" I mean, Apple certainly isn't hurting by following this strategy. I'm guessing Android itself will be slowly retreating, as more manufacturers switch to OSs built totally in-house...

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

This is the end I'm afraid.

With Jolla out of capital and with no revenue in the pipeline, it's impossible for them to develop/release any kind of product. If they can't make money themselves, they will need someone else with deep pockets to come in and rescue them. To be honest, I find it very hard to believe that anyone will licence Sailfish for a fee (considering both Android and Windows Mobile are both free). I can only see two options left at this stage.

1. Jolla scale down dramatically, release Sailfish under the Apache Licence as Open Source software and rely on the community to fund/develop the OS.
2. A hardware partner without an OS to purchase Sailfish and bring it in house (e.g. emulate what LG did with WebOS).

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Option 1 is an option. If it is a good one, I don't know. I think with this option Sailfish development would be quite slow.

Option 2 is as long an option as that hardware partner believes in open software and wants to release phones and not TVs. (I think it's a quite unrealistic option otherwise there would have been a manufacturer in the past who'd bought Jolla)

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

That's a very good question. It reminds me of the old Radio Yerevan joke from the Communist times of economic scarcity:

Q: "When will we have it good?"
A: "You already had!"

When Jolla started, I saw them as an alternative mobile phone manufacturer. That is how they presented themselves. That was their chance. It was a good chance. To build a consumer product that the customers would want to buy. Not a new iPhone. Not even a new Android. Too late for that. But Asha, Firefox, Tizen and Ubuntu are all proofs that there is market for alternatives.

Unfortunately, they squandered the chance multiple times. Instead of making the phone pleasant to use by fixing bugs ("dirty spot"), they went off and spent 6 months porting a Qt update that introduced the OOM issues and ultimately killed the best thing there was about the phone - performance. Instead of improving the basic functionality (another "dirty spot"), they spent another twelve months if not more fiddling with the UI. The result is the controversial 2.0 that polarized the community like nothing before.

And every time you tried to point any of that out, you were immediately stamped to the ground by the crowds of JulmaHerras shouting about how negative you are and how Holly Jolla knows best and we should leave them alone.

Well, they did it their way. Now you see the result.

(Regarding opening the OS, I absolutely share your view.)

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

I would only say that do not see it as white and black. There are a lot of small companies in tech who are successful. The problem of Jolla was a priorities. They went too loud but too slow. And the shaming of community was the "wake up call" first, but they ignored.
Paid apps would maybe help to keep a lot of devs from TMO which could bring more awareness of device and more devs/customers as an example.
So again, I do not think the main problem is HW problems(after all they are SW company, or am I wrong?), but strategy, communication, promises, PR, hiding things. Simple as that.

Btw community here still keeps maemo5 running. The problem is that community is not your slave and you cannot control it, it needs mutual aims and interests. But they tried to use it where they need(fanboys with PR, port things), but on other side they did not give back a lot(you need hackers, you can't limit them to specific area and close everything around, even MS gave tshirt to first person who jailbroken WP phone. A lot of big companies going that way nowdays. But if you want to do it all by yourself, you are left alone with bunch of people who just makes PR for you)

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Uhm, really? Asha is dead. Tizen just looks like Samsung trying to create a Samsung OS, which doesn't really advance the cause of alternatives in my book. Firefox looks interesting, but I have to admit I don't know much about where they are going with their OS... And I don't know just what to think about Ubuntu.

Really, I've gotta ask, _is_ there a market for alternatives?

Well, ok then -- if you can't succeed unless your OS is perfectly bug-free, feature-complete, and pleasant to use, then yeah, only mega-corps will ever succeed, because only a mega-corp can manage that kind of trick upon the initial release of an OS.

And if gaining support from "the community" requires you to make choices that the entire community supports, I've gotta say that community support is a pipe dream, because there are no choices that the entire community supports. Every decision polarizes the community.

Yup. And the lesson that will be learned, I'm afraid, is that it is stupid to do anything like they are doing; being open just doesn't pay (in every sense of that term).

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Um... actually I said that manufacturers are reluctant to put significant amount of funding into a platform that almost nobody has even heard about before. I also said that there are reasons for it, ie. thin margins or manufacturing business that is already not profitable even with platform that enjoys majority of market share. It's more like stating the obvious rather than finding someone to blame. Jolla did their best (and still do if the financing round is finished and story continues in some form for another year), but it takes more than just a good product to penetrate market and convince others to join. It takes resources, which Jolla has always been short of, and demand, which also doesn't seem to exist in significant numbers, and time to implement and polish everything, which in Jolla's case is also heavily dependent on continuing flow of investor money until there are enough manufacturers (like Intex) willing to place bet on Sailfish and generate income to keep Jolla afloat on income. Jolla can only do as much as their resources enable them to do and if it's not enough, only lesson to be learned is not to try again without big company backing since from the beginning instead of relying on anything community based. It can be a valuable lesson you know...

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

The future is actually more bleak than that. I think people in mobile will be saying, "We've had Symbian, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Windows 10, Firefox OS, Blackberry 7, Meego, Blackberry 10, WebOS, Sailfish, Ubuntu, Tizen, Bada. We've had all these OS's and they've all been crushed and lost their owners billions of Dollars collectively". Instead of asking, "Do we need to be more open?", they'll probably be saying "If we get involved in another mobile OS, we're going to lose million of Dollars".

At this stage, it's impossible for any incumbent to come in and displace Google or Apple. Microsoft spent tens of billions of Dollars to try and promote Windows for mobiles and have gotten nowhere. Did Microsoft not try hard enough? Clearly they tried very hard. Did Microsoft spend the money necessary? Yes they did, big time. Did Microsoft try to bring developers on board? Yes, they spent a fortune on porting/community efforts. Did Microsoft find a good partner? Yes, they partnered with the best mobile phone maker out there (Nokia). Did Microsoft deliver a good OS? Yes, it's certainly no worse than Android/Ios. If Microsoft can fail with a pretty decent product and all their resources - there is no hope for smaller players.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Um, no. Maemo5 is dead. The N900 was the only device that ever ran the OS, and the only device that ever will. Even the Neo900 (assuming it is ever produced) will be running a different OS; compatible with Maemo perhaps, but not the same.

At best, you can say that the community here is performing life-support on the failing body of Maemo. But this OS is never going to make it onto any other hardware platform.

So, you think the community is ever going to get a better deal than they were getting from Jolla? I sincerely doubt it...

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Problem of Jolla was that they tried to compete in already filled and highly competitive market against manufacturers that for some reason have been willing to dump products into market at loss and against OS's that have been developed for far longer and that have far more resources and power behind them. Small tech companies are usually competitive in only small niches, which obviously doesn't exist in mobile devices.

Community by itself could never create maemo5, they only try to keep alive something that was mostly created with Nokia's funds in Nokia's project. There will be no successor, no new devices and no future for maemo.

Communities are also very prone to petty infighting that doesn't get anything done without either strong and centralized leadership or project management and development run by some corporation. This is actually what underlines my points: if you don't have strong backing from a big company to fund all the community-fun, you will not get anywhere.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CNOutomr5XI

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

I think so. You just gotta aim a bit lower.

That's JulmaHerra-style response. Nothing is perfect but my point is, you can live with dripping taps but not with a leaky roof. What Jolla did was go and decorate the guest bedroom while the roof was leaking, the taps were dripping, the windows were draughty and the floors were all warped.

Priorities, man, priorities.

I take issue with using the word "open". It reminds me of another Communist time joke (with apologies to any Russians here: I did not make it up, just reproducing):

A Brit, a Frenchman and a Russian are viewing a painting of Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden.
"Look at their reserve, their calm," muses the Brit. "They must be British."
"Nonsense," the Frenchman disagrees. "They're naked, and so beautiful. Clearly, they are French."
"No clothes, no shelter," the Russian points out, "they have only an apple to eat, and they're being told this is paradise. They are certainly Russian."

We, the users, are like Adam and Eve in that joke. Jolla kept overusing the words "open", "people-" or "community-driven" et cetera, but the reality was far from that. They were as closed as they possibly could, and only disclosed anything if there was absolutely no way around. We were told that this is paradise and some users swallowed it.

That depends on how you define hope. Sure there is no hope against Apple or Google. The answer to that is, do not try to beat them. Aim lower. Be a small player on your own terms. Like Firefox or Ubuntu.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

With no new device, they had no revenue coming. Perhaps a subscription model would / could have worked: pay something, say 20 EUR per year or so to get updates even with the old device, and be able to carry your subscription to your next phone if you want to run SailfishOS on it. I'd happily buy a Sony Experia Experia Z5 AND pay Jolla a separate fee to not have to run Android on it.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Ok, now this makes sense to me! :) I don't think anybody's going to beat Apple/Google on their playing field. So, play on a different field. A Sailfish-like effort tailored to a specific consumer base might not have the economic power to support all the bells and whistles that Sailfish was trying to provide, but it might provide a basis upon which to build.

Jolla had a chicken-and-egg issue here -- without a large base of users, they couldn't maintain the level of OS quality that they were aiming for. But without hardware to run on, there was no way to create a large base of users. Something targeted instead towards a small base of users (at least to start with) might be able to overcome the hurdles that Jolla ran into...

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

The way I see it, most people are not ready to live with unclean kitchen doors. :) Mostly it all relates to the fact that there was not sufficient resources to do everything in time - most likely because of overestimating what can be achieved in certain time frame. You can carry excessive burden for a while but soon it will ultimately kick back in lowering productivity. Still, current problems are related to delayed or diminished funding, which is not community-related problem at all as the community is not really funding Jolla. Our priorities have been more in complaining about overpricing of 'deprecated' hw and that it's not foss.... :)

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

I have to strongly disagree with this (just like people who know what was behind the decision).

The upgrade to the next stable Qt version was nothing that Jolla wanted per se, it was a necessity.

First, they originally wanted to go with Qt4 and the whole UI was written in Qt4, but then the ST Ericsson disaster happened and they had to rethink their whole strategy and pretty much rewrite the whole OS, to take advantage of libhybris (as there were no manufacturers that would provide other than bionic drivers) - that required the switch from X to Wayland. Qt4 wasn't ready for Wayland, so they had to go with Qt5. At that time, Qt5 wasn't ready to ship on mobile devices, as many APIs were unstable.

So Jolla contributed a lot to Qt5 at that stage, but they played the fair game and instead of forking it (like Canonical sometimes does), they contributed to Qt5 upstream. But that meant that every time new version came out (with changes they helped to push), they had to backport these changes to their Qt version, which took more and more effort and became unsustainable.


Second, maybe you don't remember, but there was a huge (yet understandable) uproar in the developer community about many APIs not being available in Jolla Store. No location-enabled apps, no Bluetooth, etc. . It resulted in many apps being released through OpenRepos instead and an overall unfavorable situation for Jolla Store native application environment. It was bizarre, because releasing an Android app in Jolla Store allowed developers to take advantage of more APIs than if they released a native app.

This was because the Qt5 APIs were unfinished and unstable, so if they were allowed in the Store, it would mean apps could break if the API changed in the next release.

So they had to wait for the APIs to stabilize (and also contributed to them in upstream), which most of them did in Qt 5.2. So once Qt 5.2 came out, it was necessary to upgrade, so the stable APIs could come to the Jolla Store.

Yes, the process of upgrading Qt to version 5.2 was very painful (it introduced many new things, some of which were reflected in the memory management, as you mention), took lots of resources which could have been used in different ways, as you suggest, but it was absolutely essential for the platform.


I agree with you on some other points you make, but I wanted to point this out.


PS: I remember many people shouting (rightfully, yet again without seeing the whole picture) how SailfishOS is a joke, because it doesn't even allow location-enabled apps in its store. You apparently can't please everyone.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

I'm afraid this short sentence is enough. The news has been published sooner this week, Apple earns 94 % of the profit of the whole mobile market !! That also means we've to expect some deaths in the Android world. I don't think all manufacturers make a living in the Android world today.

Some wrote about Ubuntu, but I don't have the feeling Ubuntu Touch is a big success. Canonical has not the money to run after Google and Apple for sure.

I would be sad if this is the end of Jolla. In such a case, I just hope they'll open all the currently closed source.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

I know there are some strong opinions here, but most of us have witnessed both Meamo and MeeGo platforms disappearing. There is no much point trying to be right or wrong at this point. The question now is what this community can do for Jolla and SFOS at this point?

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

can we spend money ? :o

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

What sort of condition are Nokia in? Could they buy Jolla and start making phones again?

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

I don't think Nokia will enter mobile phones-business again. It's too competitive with thin margins, so it's not likely they would want to try it with fresh OS again, at least judging from the remarks of chairman Siilasmaa.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Yeah I think he said something like that there isn't anything interesting in mobile phones right now and all of them are just rectangles with black screens.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Ok so the investment money is finished?

That does not necessarily mean that a hard core of Jolla employees can't continue to work on the OS on voluntary basis.

After all a lot of great software is made and improved on voluntary base.

It means they could still make an agreement with the investors to not render useless the work done and finish some doable stuff (like porting to Fairphone).
Thanks to their voluntary position Jolla employees could have more say in making the OS they want to see (instead of continue bootlicking a few potential BRIC contractors and waste time with random UI changes like 2.0 and frankly, the tablet adventure)

This while still having the advantage of maintaining access to a massive code base on which freshly worked and in which they know their way.

I am sure we are looking at a giant opportunity to see things being opened for Jolla OS to allow more rewarding community contributions than those "patches."

Together , people powered?

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Not sure if already posted. But following today's IRC #mer-meeting was quite interesting. There were questions concerning open-sourcing more parts of Sailfish OS and how this is also up to the investors. It's worth a read, even though there are no clear answers:

Summary: http://merproject.org/meetings/mer-m...-19-14.30.html

Full log: http://merproject.org/meetings/mer-m...14.30.log.html

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Sure, all voluntary work brought maemo5 back to life, everyone running it on myriad devices. Interesting noone brought this theory here:

Just one phonecall from coderus and jolla-fsb is back on track (I understand both us/israeli feel bad about it)
pichlo: Sure it's easy to be the uncle who always disappears before supper's finished to then complain about precision of dish washing (srsly though, even in that metaphor you with your complaints complaining about other ppls view and not to jolla? they are your dishwashers, ppl here can have their own views, crazy dadjokes all around, julma sees the situation in his way, others in their, stop being the only true zogg, sure browser killed jolla, 4u)

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

"I think that it's important we carefully shape the emergence of Ubuntu so that it goes to people who are going to love it and contribute to it and be part of the ecosystem. I think it would be a mistake for us to try to go too fast because if we put it in the hands of people who don't care about Ubuntu and don't want to be part of it, right now they would be disappointed, we would be disappointed and the whole thing would be a mess."

--Mark Shuttleworth (Nov 2015)

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Oh, and Mer is aiming lower, where is financial backing for that? Right, with low enough aim you can bring product to life in decades, but not investors.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

And who told you that we have not done that? There is unfortunately still a limit on how much you can do on a volunteer bases given real life responsibilities.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

So I've ordered my second Jolla. I always thought, my next Jolla would be a Jolla 2, but I think it's better to have a spare Jolla, in case there will be no Jolla 2 and on the other side my purchase will help at least a very little bit in getting some money.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Not saying at all that you did not already give your personal maximum.
But in the past phase that may have been not enough (looking at expensive management and some freelancers profiting from the 150% voluntary efforts of hard working fixed employees).

When those types leave the building there might be some room for more rewarding voluntary work as in more work but also more say.

I have been last man standing on the ship more than once. It is not financially rewarding and brings a lot of stress but sometimes it enables you to get things done your way.

Supporting ideals and "real life responsibilities" often don't mix but whoever wants Sailfish to be successful now needs to find those rare people for which it is possible and with them reach a compromise and keep the work going, this time in the right direction.
Make SFOS feature complete so it becomes worth purchasing a license for it to replace Android on select devices.

Alterantively If nobody can agree on where to to steer Sailfish boat to then call out to the Intexes for help and sell out.

Re: Marc Dillon left Jolla
 

Yeah, I've also ordered one yesterday + the aloe TOH. Primarily as a gesture of support but also for some future proofing, just in case. :)