agreed, Sailfish is way better. But then, why don’t Jolla care a bit more about their private customers? A good enthusiastic customer base is good for sales and for platorm acceptance alike But those relatively unfinished Linux OSes exactly have that: A active and enthusiastic user base… though quite small in many cases.
Myself, having quite a bit of fun with Postmarket sxmo currently: Fringe OS’s always have less features. just compare Sailfish to the big two.
Believe I read somewhere about an Open Wiki that Jolla was considering which could be updated by community (guess, from the last community meeting). This might be a great tool to have useful information collated.
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They certainly care, they just don’t have the resources (those being: time, money, employees) to do (much) more than they’re already doing right now.
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What about Jolla just adding a new ‘Wiki’ category to this forum? A template, like the one for bug reports, could be used, and then the more knowledgeable and expert community members could post wikis covering how to work around common problems, explain how this or that function works, and so on. This could then be ‘the place to go’ for people who want to know how to do something or work around a problem. Cheap, easy, and requires no effort by Jolla folk unless they want to contribute to a wiki.
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The forum wikis could even be given a searchable category in the template … e.g. app development, workarounds, SFOS usage, etc
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Yeah, it’s missing. I got some help at: Application SDK bash: sdk-deploy-rpm: command not found
that contains the information that is missing from faq and dev docs. I immediately wanted to file this in a wiki page for app devs.
in a way we all have a community liaison with Jolla: the IRC meetings
This is getting beyond my ability to help but, to state the obvious, something isn’t working very well.
One obvious step missing is someone following through: The problem has to be raised with Jolla and waiting for the next IRC may take too long. How Jolla answer determines the next step but somebody has to lead the project from there.
The Wiki sounds like an obviously good idea. The Wiki code isn’t the easiest to handle.
Fandom will give us a free one and we can get it moved to the Wikia domain ultimately.
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It’s - literally - next week.
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Both iOS and Android have standardized badges (logos), which app developers can use to advertise that their app is available for the respective system (“Get it from the App Store”, “Available on Google Play”). Sailfish OS needs such badge too, so that its native apps become more easily visible to the people.
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It’s - literally - next week.
Even 24 hours delay can damage momentum – depends where everyone is on the ADHD scale. 
1-2 weeks is problematic if nobody’s pushing the ‘project’ through, and particularly if Jolla can’t give an answer straight away.
Jolla can afford to pay someone to spend half an hour a week to be a liaison for this community group we’re talking about. That half an hour might enable a dozen extra man hours from the community. And the IRC might not be terribly productive for Jolla either…
Discord has changed things for some developers. You can now get almost real-time feedback from select customers. You can test bug-fixes in minutes. Probably a bit far for Jolla but I’m trying to point out that doing things the way you’ve always done them isn’t necessarily the best way.
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I have to chime in an concur that using:
- Web forum
- irc on freenode
- private channels
is slow and akward. Does get things done, but my last debugging session in irc took weeks.
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Jolla had Community Manager but not anymore.
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I’m sorry if this has been said before but for the past 7 years Jolla has promised and not fulfilled on:
- More openness
- More community involvement
- Ways to monetize
Though personally I don’t care so strongly for the last point there are a lot of developers who were around at the beginning who left because of that.
Now the pine64 and the librem5 and a whole slew of truly open OS are about to present serious competition for Jolla and I really don’t know where this is headed.
As for the first 2 points there is a slew of tools and toolchains that are stuck in the past due to hesitance to introduce more openness.
There is more discussion on this here:
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-
More openness
Jolla promise to open source before they change business model. After that they didn’t say anything about that. -
More community involvement
They don’t have Community Manager from almost the year.
Of course they need community to test new releases. To get more bug reports. But money are somewhere else.
If open sourcing their apps give them more money they will do it.
You have to deal with it or go somewhere else.
And about openness Sailfish Browser is open and how many commits came from community developers?
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Sailfish Browser is an excellent example of too little too late by the time it became OSS the members of the community with the experience needed to contribute in that space had already left after years of begging to be able to do stuff there.
The sad thing is that now more and more of the big contributors are leaving, whether I leave or stay is not a big deal but a lot of the other early (and some of the later) big players have either left or are leaving.
And seriously Jolla Silica is not some god send that the moment it is OSS Jolla will lose all it’s customers it’s just another semi-decent UI toolkit “a dime a dozen” these days and if they are handicapping the platform just to keep that closed source they doing nobody any favors with that, not us and not their partners and not even Jolla as a business since the more developers who leave due to the lack of features that they want to use that became available in newer versions of Qt the less rich the ecosystem will become which will make Jolla a harder sale by proxy.
(The only bit of closed source software that is truly providing them an advantage right now is AlienDalvik, and by all accounts Anbox is working very hard on that)
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Hrm. I’m not so sure about that competition. Those SailfishOS diehards cope with installing some obscure downloadable images to their Android phones using some odd software, and they obviously can live with some defects in the operating system software, but they enjoy a comparatively beautiful user interface.
Along comes the Pinephone, or the Librem 5. Hardware is great (sort-of), but all of those “truly open OS” you mention only offer software that can hardly count as usable via a mobile user interface. Many enthusiasts bought those phones exactly for the “truly open OS” idea but didn’t receive that iOS or Android experience and blamed Pine64 for delivering broken software. The only truly open distribution for those phones that really delivers some user interface experience today’s users expect is Ubuntu Touch. As a SailfishOS fanboy, I wouldn’t buy a Pinephone, and as a Pinephone enthusiast, I wouldn’t install a non-free OS as SailfishOS.
OK, long text, I should come to a conclusion: those Pinephone customers who didn’t get a true “phone” experience from this product may be potential Sailors, because with SailfishOS they (usually) get a working and usable phone.
For those who still stick with the Pinephone the “truly open” thing is probably very important. Those would rather not consider SailfishOS.
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Regarding, the sailfish browser, please note that it became open source at an early stage of SFOS development: Sailfish OS 1.0.3.8 from 2014 afaik. I believe the absence of PRs justified sadly some of the Jolla board to stop open sourcing.
(something to keep in mind too is that one reason not to open source (from a pure financial aspect) is the need then to have more resources to read and comment the different PRs from the community. And resources is not that great at Jolla)
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[citation needed]
It’s also technically possible to work on the proprietary parts, you just have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Damien Caliste has made several improvements to several proprietary parts of Sailfish that way.
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@Maus
You are correct that these other platforms are at this time less mature then SFOS however they also have much larger communities behind them and actually allow the community to part take without excuses thus I expect they will go to a more workable situation much faster (you can even see the difference between earlier and later review).
/Edit - It it my understanding that other then Ubuntu Touch both Plasma Mobile and PostmarketOS have made big strides, that being said I do very much like SFOS and gestures but gestures these days exist in a lot of platforms to greater or lesser extents.
@patoll
You are correct it did become OSS fairly early I was wrong on that so I don’t know what went wrong there, in the maemo talk thread on the subject there is even a custom improved build by @coderus one of the more prolific contributors to SFOS in general however according to the github history he only ever got one commit into the main build.
Also regarding contributing to other parts of the code - in the early days of SFOS I found and fixed an issue with localization in the calendar, the code I edited had BSD headers but Jolla treated it as closed source it took me jumping through a lot of hoops before that made it into the main code, a similar bug exists in the Clock but I just can’t be bothered to again go through that.