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.

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.

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...

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....

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.

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.

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?

can we spend money ?

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

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.