I recently checked the infrastructure behind sailfishos.org and noticed that it appears to use several US-based providers:
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Amazon AWS for website hosting and DNS
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Microsoft for incoming and outgoing email
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Amazon SES for some outgoing email
I understand that the provider being US-based does not necessarily mean that the servers or data are physically located in the United States.
Still, considering that Sailfish OS presents itself as a European, privacy-respecting alternative, I would be interested to know:
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In which regions are these services hosted?
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What types of user data are processed by AWS, Microsoft and Amazon SES?
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Why were these providers chosen?
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Have European-owned alternatives been considered?
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Is there any longer-term plan to reduce dependency on US cloud providers?
This is not intended as criticism or an accusation. I am genuinely interested in how Jolla approaches digital sovereignty not only in the operating system, but also in its supporting online infrastructure.
Source of the overview: Where is sailfishos.org hosted?
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If you hope for an answer directly from Jolla, you should take your question to the community meeting. Here you probably will get only speculations.
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Most/all things on sailfish.org would seem to be public anyhow, the only thing that gathers serious PII is the store which is on shopify also a US player…
The only reason I think they would have to want to not be on US platforms is a patent-troll knocking them offline but as long as US controlled TLDs are in use (jolla.COM, sailfish.ORG, openrepos.NET) the rest of the stack is inconsequential in that.
As for digital sovereignty the main question is what level of control do they have and how easy is to migrate elsewhere if they want…
- MS in/out probably means they’re using M365 for the office, they could migrate to (selfhosted) nextcloud but that would definitely be the most difficult of their migrations.
Most other things are probably relatively simple to move should they every need/want to.
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Only because a company is European it doesn’t mean you can trust it more by default, the EU may have stricter privacy and consumer protection laws but the enforcement is pretty lacking within the actual member states, and the EU itself is pretty actively working on trying to dismantle whatever privacy and data security we’re still left with. Outside the EU of course the situation is even worse, and beyond companies/governments there’s no such thing as European alternatives, in fact any FOSS project that excluded developers from outside Europe purely based on their location would go against one of the core philosophies of FOSS.
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The point is that non US companies and also international foss projects cannot easily be gag ordered and legally forced to deliver data, can they? That doesn’t mean the US can’t possibly get the data but it makes it substantially harder connected to a lot more effort.
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Please let Jolla focus on their core business and what they are good at: Sailfish OS!
Moving the infrastructure to another service provider will take considerable time from development…
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Perhaps working more with European providers that share Jolla’s values could make sense. It may not be practical everywhere, but it could strengthen the idea of a genuinely European alternative.
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I’m with OP here. It’s not a pressing issue though, imo. Slightly more so the shop mentioned in post #3.
In the end, davidrasch is correct: there’s little use discussing it on the forums. Yet here we are.
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