An Open Letter From Jolla's Co-Founder

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An Open Letter From Jolla's Co-Founder

Given the news last week about Jolla going through a big round of temporary layoffs and debt restructuring, Antti Saarnio, the co-founder and Chairman of Jolla, has written an open letter about the situation...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Jolla-Open-Letter

[Serafean]

But wait : according to the graph in the blog post, they made a profit! ( "Loss" bar is in negative numbers).
Seriously though, good luck to them.

[Michael_S]

I think it would be difficult for any (fourth) party player to do battle with iOS, Android, and Windows Phone without being fully open source.

I dislike proprietary software. But if you own a large portion of a market - 10%, 20%, etc... - you can use proprietary software and customers will trust your established reputation and application developers will play by your rules to get access to your customers.

But if you're just starting out, you need early adopters to trust that your source code remains available if your company folds and you need application developers to trust that you won't screw them over by changing your APIs or altering the terms of the license agreement unfairly. Having a fully open source product helps with both of those concerns.

Open source doesn't make it easy to succeed - Mozilla is putting a lot more money into Firefox OS and Canonical is putting a lot more money into Ubuntu Touch, and they're both struggling to make a good product and struggling to be noticed by consumers. But I think their weak chances at success are much better than the chances Jolla and Sailfish OS ever had.

I with everyone involved with Jolla good luck.

[89c51]

Ubuntu and firefox might be more recognized brands but i think Jolla offers a more complete product (sw) at the moment. Also developing an OS that will be feature complete will take more than 2-3 years.

[L_A_G]

Definitely sucks to hear about their financial difficulties and I really do hope that they can get the investment they need to continue and start licensing their OS to other hardware vendors. The reason for this is that unless you're Apple, you simply can't compete in the mobile space unless you're just selling software that various hardware vendors ship pre-installed in their hardware. Microsoft is trying to do this with Nokia's old phone arm and isn't being particularly successful at it, so it's not particularly surprising that Jolla is having problems doing the same thing.

[GreatEmerald]

Well carp. I really hope they make through this (pardon the pun) sink or swim situation.

[zanny]

Definitely sucks to hear about their financial difficulties and I really do hope that they can get the investment they need to continue and start licensing their OS to other hardware vendors. The reason for this is that unless you're Apple, you simply can't compete in the mobile space unless you're just selling software that various hardware vendors ship pre-installed in their hardware. Microsoft is trying to do this with Nokia's old phone arm and isn't being particularly successful at it, so it's not particularly surprising that Jolla is having problems doing the same thing.

Its hard to compete with free. Look at how OnePlus initially was using Cyanogenmod on their devices, and when that deal fell through they just forked it and now maintain their own Android.

I cannot imagine the conversation between any hardware vendor and Jolla going anything more than "we can just stick Android on it and it costs nothing, why are we paying you?". I'm not sure if Google offers per-device support or anything, but considering how eagerly CM jumps on supporting anything with more than a thousand users it doesn't seem like it would be hard to piggy back on community interest.

Plasma Mobile is a much more interesting project. Real GNU/Linux that can run Android apps like Jolla but isn't proprietary in a gamble to try to profit off it. It means that anyone can take it and run with it, and KDE has a good history of making software projects that "take off" through third parties (cough, khtml).

[MartinK]

Plasma Mobile is a much more interesting project. Real GNU/Linux that can run Android apps like Jolla but isn't proprietary in a gamble to try to profit off it. It means that anyone can take it and run with it,

AFAIK the current plans are just to provide the mobile oriented Plasma Mobile DE/shell, not a full distro. So someone would first need to take it and couple it with a mobile oriented distro and other things like application repository. Also I don't think android app support is on the official Plasma Roadmap (yet?) road - just people extrapolating it from the also KDE related desktop oriented Shashlik project, which is itself in a very early stage of development (AFAIK).

and KDE has a good history of making software projects that "take off" through third parties (cough, khtml).

Actually khtml is the only such thing I can remember. Calligra & Krita might also be mentioned but I'm not sure how big commercial success both are, certainly not comparable to Webkit.

[M@yeulC]

Plasma Mobile is a much more interesting project. Real GNU/Linux that can run Android apps like Jolla but isn't proprietary in a gamble to try to profit off it. It means that anyone can take it and run with it, and KDE has a good history of making software projects that "take off" through third parties (cough, khtml).

Yeah, I would love to see a mobile manufacturer pick up plasma mobile

[ElectricPrism]

I think it would be difficult for any (fourth) party player to do battle with iOS, Android, and Windows Phone without being fully open source.

As I read your comment I was like 4th? Don't you mean 3rd? And then I remembered that Windows Phone is a thing still - like Zune still is a ..... oh wait.... no.....

Mozilla is putting a lot more money into Firefox OS and Canonical is putting a lot more money into Ubuntu Touch

Too bad Mozilla lost their lead developer of Firefox OS and as I recall something similar happened with Ubuntu Phone loosing a lead - strange.

I'm getting a bit annoyed at how companies feel they need to transcend and capture new markets because they succeeded at 1 thing.

Ubuntu should have stayed Desktop Linux.
Mozilla should have stayed Internet Focal - Browser, Email, Chat (Communications).
LG should make TVs and not Washing Machines & Refrigerators.

It's like these visionaries ego is validated with a single success and they suddenly think they need to set the bar higher and conquer a newer, bigger and more challenging market only to forget about the markets that made them great.

Meanwhile Ubuntu users felt quieted so they left, Firefox users felt neglected so they switched, and LG Washing Machines perform so bad it does no service to their reputation.

What happened to the Unix Philosophy of Do one thing and do it well. I don't want to own a Google Car or a iWatch, and I sure as hell don't want a TV embedded in my Dish Washer - what happened to practicality and reasonableness.