[Strategies] Bringing more sailors to SFOS

General
#182

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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#183

It’s - literally - next week.

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#184

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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#185

It’s - literally - next week.

Even 24 hours delay can damage momentum – depends where everyone is on the ADHD scale. :wink:

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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#186

I have to chime in an concur that using:

  1. Web forum
  2. irc on freenode
  3. private channels
    is slow and akward. Does get things done, but my last debugging session in irc took weeks.
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#187

Jolla had Community Manager but not anymore.

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#188

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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#189

  • 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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#190

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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#191

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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#192

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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#193

[citation needed]​​​​​

#194

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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#195

@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.

@nthn


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.
#196

So, by “more and more big contributors are leaving”, you actually meant only one developer who had already quit development on two of the three applications he was working on at the start of 2019, which is now more than two years ago. It’s a shame he left, particularly because I used BeRail quite often (it still works, I just don’t need it that much anymore, especially nowadays), but you don’t have to be overly dramatic about it - for pretty much everyone who jumped ship, someone else took over development of their applications or created a better alternative. People who were dissatisfied with what Sailfish, and by extent Jolla, had to offer by and large already left before 2015. In fact, if you read between the lines, the main reason Dylan left is just that he wanted to try out something new.

Regarding what you said about gestures, no other platform does them well. I’ve been trying out Android 10 with the new gesture navigation on my Xperia 10 II, and it functions horribly. To give an example: if I have a fullscreen application open and want to open a different application, I need to: swipe up from the bottom to reveal the notification bar at the top of the screen and some useless bar at the bottom of the screen, then swipe up from the bottom again, depending on how well I swiped up I either get shown a view of the ‘running’ applications or get kicked to the home screen, if it shows the view of ‘running’ applications I need to swipe up from the bottom again, and finally I need to swipe up once more to access the list of applications. iOS’s gestures are equally bonkers and make it easy to do things you barely ever want to do, whilst simultaneously making it really hard to do the simplest things.

It’s not as though people working on other platforms are taking away from Sailfish either, rather the opposite is true: all of these platforms can run pretty much the same stuff, only their UI is different. rinigus has shown that it is possible by splitting up Pure Maps into platform-dependent and platform-independent parts, allowing developers of any platform that can run Qt to simply fill in the gaps for their platform without having to write yet another maps application from scratch. Other developers are planning or working on doing the same thing.

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#197

@nthn
I gave you one example, there are a ton of varying size guys from the beginning who are no longer around and haven’t been around for various different time spans to name a few:

  • thp (gpodder, pyotherside)
  • bwalter (meerun)
  • NielDK
  • kimmo
  • leszek seems to still blog about SFOS but has not updated apps in ages

How many of the applications in the “Top Apps” category in the store/OpenRepos are still actively maintained? The answer is of the first 10 non-Jolla apps only 5 have had a recent update (if we count slightly more then 1 year as recent).

All those were tremendous losses to the ecosystem and though it is true that some things can be split in different sections it is a pain for the developer and unless they are very dedicated to the platform at some point they will stop, whether because of the differences in features and support between Qt versions or other things that make continuing more difficult.

SFOS does not make the developer money, so the moment they are working on multiple platforms the chance of them sticking around indefinitely while the toolchain on one platform lags more and more behind the toolchain on the other platform making maintaining different platforms harder and harder is low.

Even on SFOS itself maintaining an application that provides features beyond what is allowed in the store is a huge pain unless you say to hell with the store you need to basically maintain and test 2 versions of your application.

Jolla absolutely did a great job on their UI but the thing is that it is not the killer feature that everyone is here for, I can’t speak for everyone but I suspect a large part of the people are here for a secure (Linux based) OS that respects their privacy while also having the option to run the Android apps they need for work etc, the secure of the above claim is placed in peril by the heavily outdated stack in the name of not wanting to pay for a commercial license and not wanting to use GPLv3.

This topic is about how to get more people on board and I contend that Jolla for whatever reason is doing everything in their power to get less people on board and that pains me, as said previously I have been around since the n900 and I would love to stay here for another decade but at the current pace I genuinely don’t know if SFOS will remain the right answer for me.

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#198

Correct me if I’m wrong but I have the impression that every third or even second topic - regardless of the original subject - ends up being deviated to a to-and-fro discussion about whether the Sailfish boat is about to sink or not. The issues are just reheated over and over.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t poin out problems (there’s e.g. a bug category) or that there aren’t justified reasons to be disappointed by the way things turned out to be.

But I’d wager new people ‘boarding the ship’ for the first time won’t be attracted much by these lengthy discussions that help no one. and for the more (or still) enthusiastic sailors it wears on their motivation, too I’d imagine.

If Jolla needs to improve their way of communicating with the community maybe we should, as well.

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#199

On a discussion going on for over a month with almost 200 reactions about the future of the platform not a single post is from a Jolla employee.

'nuff said.

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#201

insert “thank you” gif from michael scott in the office

#202

Again, the point of the topic is to interact between ourselfs (non jolla employees) to see how can we help.

When some users started to formulate questions regarding the evolution of Jolla and how could we help (for example a partnership with Fairphone), I went there and asked Jolla on IRC, and got the answers (see the “edit” in the topic’s introduction message for the link).

I would be more then glad to exchange on this topic like strategies, us users, can take to make SFOS a better product on our point of view (such as more apps or users)

Now, as you can see, many messages here are about what Jolla should do or did in the past. I recon that some are annoyed about X, Y or Z thing Jolla did or didn’t, but it’s nor the point of the topic neither (in my very personal opinion) helping the debate.

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