Jolla Announces A Split, To Focus On Sailfish OS Licensing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Jolla Announces A Split, To Focus On Sailfish OS Licensing

Times don't appear good at Finnish phone maker Jolla that hoped to rise from the fall of Nokia's MeeGo attempts. Jolla went public today with a focus shift at the company and they'll now be spinning off their device business...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Device-License

[dh04000]

"open mobile operating system", Sailfish OS

Ha, that's a laugh. Sailfish is more closed than Android. I hope they fail.

[Aeder]

A mobile OS licensing business? Aren't both Android and Windows Phone practically free to license at this point?

[duby229]

I'm still of the opinion Jolla would make for a pretty good SmartTV/PVR/MediaCenter OS. If they could get TV manufacturers to adopt it, the users of those products would probably be very happy with it.

[Akka]

A mobile OS licensing business? Aren't both Android and Windows Phone practically free to license at this point?

Not as in beer. As I understands it phone manufactures need to pay google for the closed Android software like google play.

[axfelix]

I'm tentatively happy about this, given how difficult it must be to compete on tech manufacturing in Europe these days, and how nice it'd be for them to provide better driver support for Sailfish in lieu of a Jolla successor. We'll see.

[murak]

Seems like the beginning of the end, sadly. I own a jolla and while it's nice it was not what I personally was waiting for. I had my hopes up for a N900-2 and I think many others had the same thought.

[Luke_Wolf]

Why the doom and gloom? I thought this was always Jolla's long term plan. They can't exactly expand into OS licensing without divesting the licensing company of the hardware they're making, and there's no reason to do this unless they've got enough interest from OEMs to actually make this work.

[xeekei]

Why the doom and gloom? I thought this was always Jolla's long term plan. They can't exactly expand into OS licensing without divesting the licensing company of the hardware they're making, and there's no reason to do this unless they've got enough interest from OEMs to actually make this work.

This is the Phoronix forums. Here, the future for any company that makes any changes is dark.

[jntesteves]

Before, they were competing with the likes of Apple, Asus, HTC, LG, Microsoft/Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony and 999 chinese manufacturers.
Now they "only" have to compete with Android, Blackberry, Cyanogen OS, Firefox OS, Tizen, WebOS and Windows. And most of the above become potential partners. I think this move makes sense.