Sailfish OS 3.3 "Rokua" Released With Many Improvements For This Mobile Linux OS

[Vistaus]

Considering it's taken this long I wouldn't count on ever getting it.

Oh and before you call it a scam there's a big difference between an actual scam, which requires intention, and the downright cursed development tail-end for the tablet. First the intended display panel went out of production necessitating some major re-engineering as nothing that would serve as a drop-in replacement was available. After that Chinese new year took place just as it was going into production and all the factories shut down as the migrant workers left for their home towns. While they were out a funding round got delayed so when the workers returned back to work Jolla couldn't pay the assemblers, who preceded to take a large number of the devices, install Android on them, and then sell them before Jolla could get the money together to pay them.

The really big issue with the assemblers taking their devices as payment was that during the development Intel had left the mobile SoC market so the main SoC was no longer available as they went into production. What Jolla had as they went into production was all they were ever going to be able to get. Completely re-engineering the board as an ARM-based device wasn't an option either as the tablet was mostly a bought-in design from another Finnish company called Aava Mobile as they stopped designing devices in-house.

As for why they haven't fully refunded everyone yet, it's simply that they just don't have the money to do it. But they are refunding people as they have money available for it.

I know all of that, I was part of the Sailfish community back then. So you don't have to defend them, I wasn't going to complain at all. Like I said: I was part of the community, so I know it wasn't a scam and I know how everything went down.

[edwaleni]

According to various sources and numbers found on the net, I think you are correct.


This I don't think is correct. Both based on observation and from a technical perspective.

First, I don't think the tablet market is losing share, even it clearly shows decline in sales.
(Due to the Corona situation and mandatory home schooling, I think we will see a short increase in sales for February/April.)

It basically boils down to that nothing new and interesting is happening in the tablet space, people keep their devices far longer than their cell phones. There is nothing to justify changing the device every 1 to 2 years. A 5 year old tablet is still quite usable. People spend the money upgrading their phones, but continue to use the old tablet as it works ok. The market is more or less saturated, the ones with need of a tablet, already have one.

https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45959420

If not for Apple's corporate sales it would have been worse.

Overall tablet share is 3.84%.

This article corroborates what you were saying about people holding on to them longer.

https://www.ejectejecteject.com/stat...-and-analysis/

[L_A_G]

I know all of that, I was part of the Sailfish community back then. So you don't have to defend them, I wasn't going to complain at all. Like I said: I was part of the community, so I know it wasn't a scam and I know how everything went down.

Maybe, but not everyone knows what actually happened and there's still people going around insisting that they got scammed by Jolla.

[blackiwid]

Maybe, but not everyone knows what actually happened and there's still people going around insisting that they got scammed by Jolla.

Well you have a very narrow definition of the word scam, from a legal standpoint you are in that way right that nobody sued them and now judge sentenced them, but taking maybe to big risks with money of others can be fraudulent especially if you are not totally transparent how risky your operation is. I am not sure about how this would be seen in that case. It seems to me that they were in financial trouble before this tablet shit even started, because if you need money from hardware you later deliver to pay your current bills and find nobody to finance that to you, well you are at least very risky, but maybe that is the nature of all this crowdfunded things and why most of them fail. You just would think if a company is able to produce succesfully a phone and deliver it that they then not fail with a stupid tablet.

But what I would consider more Scamy was their lie about opensourcing stuff, it was never any priority and in my view also never their true intention to do so, of course you can't proof intentions, but actions tell more than words.

They played people, if they had clear intentions that would have said within 2 months or 2 years we get that done, I don't think that if you wont do it in 2 months you will do it never, because it's clear that you just do it against your will in the first place, if you think it's the right thing to do and a good business decision you don't need 2 years to it but you could at least give that date, and maybe because of things fail with it. But if you say "we will do that" and than come 10 yeras later and say "that takes time" or something you got to be kidding me. You knew not giving out all the code will make you omre interesting for a evil company buy you out, and that is what happend.

You miss out on hundrets if not thousends of community patches the system would have newest gcc suport since years if it would be opensource you are willing to pay that price so it has a high importance to you that you make sure that it's BY INTENTION not opensource. And that means that you lied, you never had the intention to opensource it. So now librem does the real job together with the opensource community and to some degree also the Pinephone community bring out a real opensource phone not only the software but also the hardware which is nessary anyway because a opensource OS alone would not be enough with the normal smartphone hardware.

And that makes it very hard to justify products from them because well it's basically as much as a different android launcher total survalence heck even worse than lineageos because they are at least fully opensource. Why would somebody want to switch from a opensource os like android (lineageos) to a proprietary one?

[Nille_kungen]

I love the idea and have read about several times over the last few years but those old packages do sound annoying. How did they get to version 3.3 without a decent browser? People just avoid the native browser? What do you use?

I often use Android browsers.
Firefox (fennec).

https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec-latest&os=android&lang=multi

Opera for android

https://download.opera.com/download/get/?partner=www&nothanks=yes&product=Android

[Vistaus]

Maybe, but not everyone knows what actually happened and there's still people going around insisting that they got scammed by Jolla.

Maybe, but you were specifically addressing me, which is why I replied the way I did.

[L_A_G]

Maybe, but you were specifically addressing me, which is why I replied the way I did.

You do realize that more people than just you read these posts? A forum is something of a broadcast media rather than something genuinely person-to-person like email.

...

Ummm... They've repeatedly said that if they fully owned their codebase themselves they would open source it in a heartbeat and that the blocker for that has been that the co-owners of the codebase. That they can't just open source it unilaterally as they simply aren't legally allowed to do that and if they did, would obviously get shut down by their investors/owners and get sued personally some pretty serious breach of contract and intellectual property rights violations.

This is something some of the more dishonest open source absolutists keep going on about. They all know about why Jolla can't just fully open source their codebase unilaterally as they don't fully own it themselves, as it's part owned by the people who gave them the funds to develop it in the first place, and then go on about how they're lying con artists while deliberately leaving this out. We're talking Fox "News" levels of dishonesty and maliciousness here and this level of dishonesty honestly shouldn't even warrant a reply.

[blackiwid]

Ummm... They've repeatedly said that if they fully owned their codebase themselves they would open source it in a heartbeat and that the blocker for that has been that the co-owners of the codebase. That they can't just open source it unilaterally as they simply aren't legally allowed to do that and if they did, would obviously get shut down by their investors/owners and get sued personally some pretty serious breach of contract and intellectual property rights violations.

Well if they had not the power to opensource it why did they advertise that they will eventually opensource it, that's even worse than what I thought, because then they can't even bring the excuse that they had no time to do it yet, they knew from the start that it will definitely never happen and still advertised it.

Also nobody forced them to create they business based on software that they have no control over, they did that so it's their fault, too.

[L_A_G]

...

Outside of specifically advertising the bits that are very much open source, like the Mer core, Jolla hasn't advertised SailfishOS in general as being open source in years. So you're clearly misremembering things or making them up in your own head again.

The reality is that money doesn't grow on trees and that everything that companies make needs to be funded somehow. This is the reason why most code that gets written is still proprietary even when it's built on top of open source frameworks or open APIs. It doesn't matter what the laa-laa land that exists between your ears says, this is just how things work out here in the real world.

[deusexmachina]

We don't need Jolla - just a few more devs on GrapheneOS... With 2 more hardware platforms supported, it would be all most security/privacy conscious folks would need.