RFC: Revision of /home encryption on SFOS

[lbt]

It seems that you’re feeling frustrated. I’ve been there (I too originally came from the community), Do rest assured that our intention is to work with the community.

I’ll try and answer some points - I apologise if I miss any context and I’m very much just getting up to speed with community life after a long hiatus working on other personal projects. Please be gentle

I think you should also bear in mind that Jolla, as an organisation, has commercial interests and is not a pure open source project so we do acknowledge that these limit our ability to share future plans and we’re also very limited in the resources (basically time) that any individual can allocate to the community - I think all of us do at least some of community work on our own time and as community members.

@olf

1. Depleting the energy of community members by creating additional, formal hurdles and efforts for community members: One has to propose questions at the right place and timely in advance, plus be present at the community meeting, or it will be ignored completely.

Formalising things is a double-edged sword. It makes it clear how to get things done and can also be seen as a barrier.
As Thaodan said - we, as sailors, need to ensure that what we communicate is in fact what’s being planned, usually by another busy team. This needs us to ask around and often discuss what to say.

Questions are not a one-way street. We would like discsussion so asking for people to be present to ask their questions (or to nominate a proxy to do it for them) happened when people would ask questions and not be present for the discussion afterwards - that’s reasonable isn’t it?

As an aside these community meetings are not far off what I (as a community guy) tried to get way back in MeeGo times.

@olf

2. A way for Jolla to easily ditch questions from the community, without much visibility. Either by aforementioned formal hurdles, but also happens with most of the questions posed at the “community meetings” (e.g. by stating “We will discuss it internally” and no feedback is ever provided). And knowing that far less people read the “community meeting” logs than this forum.

So you would like us to track these promises to respond in a more formal manner? I’ll discuss it internally
Seriously, I agree and will ask Sim who chairs the meetings to say how he handles this.
(Actually someone made a suggestion… would you like to take on that role/responsibility? Serious offer.)

@olf

3. If all this distraction fails, because someone has the energy to run through steps 1 and 2 multiple times with their question, Jolla’s way out is what you already observed: “Even thought i wouldn’t expect a proper answer.”

This usually is a response to questions about future plans or dates (like Qt6 etc). Of course keeping packages updated is in our plans - but plans change all the time and making public statements about them and then failing to meet those dates would result in more ‘feedback’ so we tell you why we don’t comment on them… and people ask anyway… sigh

@olf

4. Jolla stated, that one purpose of this forum is community interaction, and obviously some Jolla employees read and sometimes even post here. But again, this is usually nothing constructive, like @Thaodan’s “Wait and do it differently, we may come up with something using that, at some time in the distant future”. And we all experienced many times, that “Jolla time” often means “never” (XMPP support, VoLTE support etc.).

It’s going to vary and some is not going to be what may be hoped for (especially when it’s about plans, like VoLTE, XMPP as above). Also bear in mind that we don’t and can’t plan externally. There are simply too many commercial considerations that affect prioritisation and direction.
Saying sailors “usually” offer “nothing constructive” seems a bit harsh don’t you think?
Aside if you want to follow the work then please see the public git repos in the relevant packages.

@olf

It seems to be an inherent part of Jolla’s company culture only to use the community as paying beta testers (and even that is handled very awkwardly), but ignore almost all other input. Especially developers output and enhancements, rangeing from the many, useful Patchmanager Patches which would have been so easy for Jolla to integrate to big, valuable contributions as e.g. @llelectronics updated QtWebkit (which was proposed at “community meetings” at least three times: Ignored the first time, “we will look at it” without feedback the second time, “Oh, we forgot to handle that internally” without further feedback the third time).

We do take extensive code from the community - I think Damien is a great example of that.

Sometimes however I think we need to find a way to say “sorry, that approach doesn’t fit” and sometimes it’s difficult to find a way to say that. Maybe we should hire the old Linus?

@olf

Jolla could extract so much out of the community and there are so many examples of companies doing that successfully (e.g., RedHat, SuSE), but for some reason they do not seem to be interested (consistently since 2013).

In your previous point you say “only to use the community as paying beta testers” and now we should “extract so much out of the community”? It’s a hard balance isn’t it.

Contributing code to packages and an OS is hard. It takes a lot of time and energy - and often specialised knowledge.
Quite a few people who work for Jolla would differ - because that’s how they came to work for Jolla

Community contributions are not just code for the OS - look at what @piggz and @rinigus have done with the OBS and Chum recently - look at what @Basil has done for years with OpenRepos.

Anyway, I suppose I’m trying to show you the other perspective. The passion (and frustrations) that comes in from the Jolla side (do you seriously think that individual sailors don’t want to share our plans and shout about what we’re working on?) . The community and company may not always be perfectly aligned and there may be miscommunication on both sides - but there is a real caring on both sides.

Hope this comes across as a constructive post…