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0 pointsmaheart9y ago0 comments

> Jolla has always used (and continues to use) outdated hardware

But Jolla has shipped. Jolla 1, Intex Aquafish, Turing Phone, Inoi R7[1]. Limited runs of Jolla C, Tablet. Sony Xperia X should be coming soon. This is a startup of (these days) less than 50 people, cut them some slack, they're competing with giants.

> The Sailfish SDK relies on VirtualBox for the emulator and for native compilation

It's infinitely more efficient to build and ship 1 VirtualBox OS Bundle, v.s. building and maintaining at least 3 different cross-compilation toolchains (one for each of: Windows, MacOSX, Linux). With limited developer resources, I'd choose the latter route too.

I also prefer this setup to things like scratchbox2 and Android's (or iPhone's) emulator. It's portable between base OS's and it makes use of existing and well-known tools (VirtualBox).

> For years, Jolla withheld from or misled the public on the state of internal affairs

The Tablet fiasco could have been communicated better. At the same time, that's the risk you take with Kickstarter/IndieGoGo. It's a startup.

I don't agree with any of your other points, they're a startup, it's not all smooth sailing.

> Sailfish OS always lacked basic security features for applications (QT Quick embedded in plain text) or for the phone itself (encryption).

In regards to packaging, or app isolation, Jolla's wisely chosen to work on "mobile problems" and leave package management to the heavyweights (e.g. RH with Flatpak).

VPN support was added in the last release. The public git repos show ongoing work to filesystem encryption.

> Sailfish OS was never true open source, even less so than Android

Significant pieces of SailfishOS are proprietary. However, I think it's a more "inclusive" OS than Google's Android. Google develops Android. SailfishOS is GNU/Linux, it's developed by Red Hat (e.g. Linux kernel, systemd), Intel (Connman, ofono), Qualcomm (BlueZ), Qt (Qt Company), Mozilla (Firefox), GNU (CLI tools), KDE (Calligra), Collabora (gstreamer), etc.

I'm hopeful that one day SailfishOS will be fully open source.

> Very poor/non-existent developer relations

Disagree. They hold fortnightly meetings (#mer-meeting on Freenode). Most of the code is public (https://git.merproject.org/). There's a public Bugzilla (https://bugs.merproject.org/). There's discussion boards (https://together.jolla.com/). Community translation portal (http://translate.sailfishos.org/).

[1] https://together.jolla.com/question/136143/wiki-available-de...

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escapetech9y ago

> But Jolla has shipped. Jolla 1, Intex Aquafish, Turing Phone, Inoi R7[1]. Limited runs of Jolla C, Tablet. Sony Xperia X should be coming soon

Proving my point - all of these devices (except for Experia, and possibly the Tablet) ran on hardware outdated at release time. Ubuntu Phones ran on reasonably performant hardware (Edge, Meizu MX5 and Google Nexus 5) at release time.

Your personal preference for VirtualBox, or VirtualBox being "well known", is irrelevant. Virtualization is unnecessary and a waste of resources compared to cross compilation and emulation via QEMU.

> At the same time, that's the risk you take with Kickstarter/IndieGoGo. It's a startup.

The tablet problem was more than a matter of communication. It demonstrated that Jolla wasn't ready for prime-time the way they advertised. Backers will empathize with a product not ready for prime-time if the people involved are transparent. Whether you like it or not, unaccounted product delays, CEO's quitting without explanation, staff being laid off, and other internal matters do erode consumer confidence and burns bridges.

> VPN support was added in the last release. The public git repos show ongoing work to filesystem encryption.

Perhaps Russian government involvement is finally starting to pay off? They certainly couldn't have been bothered to add these things towards the beginning.

> I'm hopeful that one day SailfishOS will be fully open source.

Sure, with less than 0.1% of the market space, what do they have to lose. They've certainly lost a lot of other things though.

> Disagree. They hold fortnightly meetings

That wasn't always the case, certainly not the case in 2014/2015. Sailfish's lead SDK developer actually spent more time promoting his personal CMake alternative than his work on the Sailfish SDK.

Ubuntu Phone OS developers were always responsive to SDK issues, even when they didn't have the answer.

maheartOP9y ago

Error by me in the last sentence, I meant to say "former", not "latter".

> It's infinitely more efficient to build and ship 1 VirtualBox OS Bundle, v.s. building and maintaining at least 3 different cross-compilation toolchains (one for each of: Windows, MacOSX, Linux). With limited developer resources, I'd choose the latter route too.

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