Here everyone has a say and many are committed for a long time, but only the company bares financial responsibility. How do JollaBoys see this? Where the money is, there should be made decisions. A complicating fact is that many developers in the community kept Sailfish alive for free, out of love for the OS.
It’s clear that nobody wants the surveillance model of G and the expensiveness of A. What then?
Gaël Duval developed a model where everyone can buy a ready device with the possibility of a subscription to his cloud. Initially he said he wanted something for ‘mum and dad’ too.
Volla has another option, also a customerfriendly device, ready with VollaOS. No account needed, no cloud, no subscription, yet regularly updates. Both, Murena and Volla let you use of FDroid and Aurora. That’s also a difference with Sailfish, which has it’s own apps.
It’s obvious that Jolla has to make money in order to survive and eventually to grow. How?
Again, that depends on how the company and the community see the future of Sailfish. Will it be a playtool for devs and tinkerers only or will it be available and acceptable for ‘everyone’, conform the ambitions of the company during the time of Jolla1?
About costs for customers: my daughters still use an iphone 6s, while I have a Jolla 1 and several disabled Sony’s in my drawer. It makes me ashamed causing so much electronic waste.
I want to add that Volla has a very good, complete user instruction. Jolla also has an instruction (did that innumerable times because of frequent rebooting, booting) but only on the device. This is not enough for new customers. Jolla/Sailfish plus the community have to make a choice : are we going the sectarian way or are we an open company that develops and sells a mobile OS for everyone?
This has the potential to hurt the devs and enthusiasts which own several devices.
I don’t throw away the old device when upgrading. When I switched from an Aquafish to an Xperia X, I managed to kill a SIM slot with an improperly cut down SIM card in my Xperia X. I needed an immediate solution, bought a second device and a license (didn’t bother to ask for a license transfer) and kept the other device for tests and debugging.
Now I use an Xperia 10 III, but I still keep the old devices for occasional test and a second phone number.
I don’t see how this can be covered in a smart way. If you allow people to register more than one device to an account, you have the same problem as media streaming services, people will “share” their account.
Limit it to three devices? You will find a dev which owns more than three. Limit it to one device of each model? Some people have two identical devices to have one as a spare and for tests without risking their daily driver.
Really? “Forever” in IT nowadays means 2-3 years. After that period (4-5 max.) in reality the licence is practically useless.
For me it depends.
What is the offer here?
To pay a subscription to be able to use the same app support I’m using now and the very outdated predictive text (quoting jolla support)? Then no thanks.
Is this going to improve my user experience with much faster development, bug fixes and new features?
Then hell yes.
I would gladly pay 10-20€ a month or something to make sailfish modern and much better.
So as I said, it really depends on the actual offer here.
Use a pay-as-you-like model for the OS where the payed amount is converted to points which can be used for voting on priority for new features and bug fixes. This would require Jolla to open up their bug tracker or add a separate public bug tracker like how Qt handles it.
This would have several benefits:
- Users can pay as much as they can afford. Avoids the pay-for-updates problem where users only pay for one month since they think the subscription price is too high.
- Incentive to pay more. The more you pay the more you get to influence features/bug fixes. So if one bug really annoys you can then pay more to add more votes for that bug.
- Jolla will get indications on what features/bugs are most important for the community
- There is no conflict between subscriptions and open sourcing the OS (compared to paying for updates which give Jolla little incentive to continue with open sourcing the OS)
Keep subscription for Android support separate from subscription for OS. I have not interest in Android support but I would like to support OS development. Perhaps use another subscription model for Android support instead of pay-as-you-like?
Some have mentioned premium subscriptions which could include things like VPN or cloud storage. I would prefer to not include this kind of stuff in the OS subscription. If needed then add these as optional separate subscriptions like Android support.
Sidenote on Qt update:
From my understanding updating Qt would require Jolla to pay for Qt licenses since it has partly closed source.
Possible options:
- Pay for Qt license. (Given that Qt licenses are not cheap I understand why they hesitate.)
- Open source the OS (then they wouldn’t have to pay the Qt license).
The issue with open sourcing is to still have an income for development. The community for SFOS is small so the income from subscription model will likely be no way near costs for development but hopefully a pay-as-you-like model could contribute to this.
Can this misconception just die already?
There might exist one component or another that has switched from LGPL to GPL, but the general issue is GPL2 vs GPL3. So anything that was compliant before will be compliant now. The real problem is about being able to lock users out from actually swapping out the software in a commercial setting or not. (Which is or can be seen as a selling point in some circumstances).
If it was just that, how come they are giving it away for free?
100% correct.
But how to handle that is an issue of mindset: Other Linux distributions (RedHat, Ubuntu, SUSE) are also used in commercial environments, where users must not be able to alter the software stack of the device (usually a laptop or PC) they are using. These Linux distributions have long comprehended that it is futile to strictly avoid *GPLv3 licensed software and hence just ship it, because it is never them, but the company who deploys such software, who does not grant their employees or clients / customers (= users) the rights which *GPLv3 provides and propagates.
A more balanced and still feasible approach is to strictly avoid cryptographic software components which are *GPLv3 licensed, because the critical sections of *GPLv3 address exactly the authentication and authorisation mechanisms for which cryptography is crucial. IMO using recent Qt releases does not create an issue while using an recent GnuPG does. Luckily there are alternatives as sequoia-pgp and e.g. a current RPM can utilise them.
I completely agree that it shouldn’t have to be a blocker in more than perhaps a small fraction of cases.
Though we should probably spin this back to the monetization aspect of it, or move the continued discussion to another thread.
1
I’d like to include some ingredient here, which is just shipping binaries.
I think Jolla could have Sailfish fully open sourced. It just so happens that the binaries are shipped by Jolla.
If you have the ability to build them on your own, then good for you. If you don’t, you have to pick: binaries from Jolla or from a fellow “personal repo”.
Are there going to be derivatives? Of course. But who is scared of little competition.
2
Now, back to the subscription model:
Some software apps do it like this: you get a 1 year subscription that entitles you to all releases in that year period (buy time + 1year]. That means the current one you’re buying and most probably the next version, because they make major releases yearly.
The first subscription is 2X, but extending that is X/year.
When you stop paying, you just remain in that 1 year interval you last bought. Whenever you feel you need to catch up you have to pick:
- pay all the extensions that you missed till today, so
X/year to access the current version - pay only the current version, which is 2
X, and might require re-installation (stop releases be like).
So if you come back to sailfish after 2 years of hiatus, you would either pay 2X or 2 times X. If you come back after 3 years… 2X and reinstall or 3 times X and upgrade through 2 or 3 major releases.
However if you come back after 6 months, you pay X but the extension is from your previous interval, so it is X for 6 more months.
Our X seems to be around 25 today, but maybe adding subscription can lower it to 20 (so 40 initially, 20 every year after)
3
Regarding developer devices - those could just be downgraded to Sailfish X (no AAS/Exchange/etc).
Of course nobody knows how to uninstall AAS just because you have now the free version. This just means it won’t be upgraded next time, or maybe it would stop working if you upgrade. Or prevent the upgrade, and you will manually uninstall it. Same for other proprietary bits.
Not really “forever” but actually only within the life time of the specific device it was bought for. It doesn’t really matter that the licence of my old XA2 Ultra remains valid if the device is no longer used as on SFOS it lacks VoLTE support (making it useless as a phone) and is simply too sluggish for 2024 standards. As for the 10 III, I’ve been using it for some 1,5 years now and I will switch to a new model (be it 10 IV or V) as soon as Jolla announces it, i.e. probably within weeks or months. So in both cases the life span of my SFOS devices is LESS THAN 2 YEARS and then they just end up in a drawer catching dust. It wouldn’t make absolutely any difference if they had a subscription based model rather than one-time licence purchase, because I would stop paying their subscription fees the very moment I’d stop using them and switch to a new model, anyway.
So, once again, where’s the benefit?
Please also don’t forget that the licence is actually only for the Android support and a few minor things like predictive text input, and NOT for the OS. The actual OS is free and (mostly) open source. And even though the licence theoretically remains valid forever, past the very moment that Jolla freely decides that your device model will no longer get updates of certain important things, like the aforementioned VoLTE for all models older than the 10 II, or the Android OS version update above 4.4 on the Xperia X, Gemini PDA and the Jolla 1, even though their licences theoretically remain valid, they’re actually of no real value anymore. Hence the “Updates as long as device is supported” disclaimer from Jolla. At some point, to be freely chosen by Jolla, the 10 II and III will stop getting (some or all) updates, too. Who knows, maybe 5G support will only be offered for the upcoming new devices to be announced soon but not for the 10 III or II? So NO, licences definitely do NOT work forever.
Finally someone who gets it.
I lived through a few pretty nervous months last year not knowing whether Jolla and my daily driver OS would have a future or not.
If the company decides that e.g. a monthly subscription model would be a contribution to stabilizing their business model, I would be happy to pay a little sum on a regular basis.
I don’t have a tech job like many people on here and sometimes money is tight, but 5 Euro a month for the privacy, independence and unique UX of Sailfish OS is not too much to ask in my opinion. So count me in.
At this point and knowing all the trouble Qt has caused to SFOS what i’d like to see is Jolla implementing a compositor in whatever language/library it wants and letting users use whatever wayland compatible toolkit (GTK EFL etc) they want for their apps.
Maybe this could be possible long term, but seems quite a task to implement. Maybe if it were done from the start, but it was not. I have also heard that one thing that Qt does well is that it can run on pretty much any hardware. Having different UI stacks on top of Sailfish without any consistency would bring its own problems I am sure.
People i trust with stuff like that told me that writing a wayland compositor isn’t that huge of a task. If SFOS has specific requirements that will make it huge i have no idea.
I would be willing to spend 10-20 euro per month, to support Jolla ( I am also not the developer just ordinary user) But I would like to at least to see feature roadmap/comittment.
Irrespectively: looking in the replies in this thread and mixed perception, maybe most smooth way to introduce the subscription was to do it only per new /additional features and leave the rest with current licensing scheme.
How about the possibility of crowd funding? Someone posts specific changes to the OS, and then the budget is sourced from the community. Don’t know if its enough, but f. ex. 10.000 $ for an extended bluetooth functionality, etc. I remember that there was an issue with the tablet crowdfunding once, but this had other reasons. I mean the crowdsourcing could be organized strictly refundable if the goal is not reached, so in case a goal is not reached, nobody would have lost any investment. And then also everybody could donate as much as he wants in order to the importance, the function has for the user. I think Volla did it that way, no!? At least in term of hardware… 
This could be a option i have done something before to crowd funding waydroid and indeed it works, but i dont know for long term about this… Mebay that Jolla can indeed use Indiegogo for this and make some agree with Sony the can buy devices from them some same way as Volla has done, and then sell them with a flashed Sailfish OS on it…
would be broadly accepted by most Jolla users.
Speculation. I, for one, get allergic reactions when I hear “MRR/ARR”. I nope out at that point.