- cross-posted to:
- linuxphones@lemmy.ca
- linuxphones@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linuxphones@lemmy.ca
- linuxphones@lemmy.ml
The Finnish company Jolla is back with the Linux-powered Jolla Phone. It’s being positioned as an antidote to the US-dominated smartphone status quo of Android and iOS.
While SailfishOS seems neat, it’s worth noting that some components, like some drivers, the homescreen UI, the compositor, some QML components and the Android compatibility layer are closed source. The rest of the software stack seems to be based on open source components from desktop Linux. The package manager uses RPM.
The nice part is that all those parts can be recreated as open source if SailfishOS gains traction. Just like in Linux private blobs have their open source counterparts.
Nemo Mobile aims to do exactly that.
That’s a very glass half full way of looking at it but doesn’t that apply just as much to Android?
With Android the “AOSP team” has to play cat and mouse with Google.
I feel like the point was to get away from the Android/iOS duopoly, not to court open-source advocates… though it does sort of do that, using Linux.
I don’t disagree and I definitely trust a Finnish company founded by former Nokia engineers a lot more than Google or Apple. But I think there is a lot of overlap between both the “buy European” movement and Fediverse users and those who prefer open solutions wherever possible. A lot of those people would prefer a solution where the userland and/or kernel and/or SDK is completely open source. They will have to weigh their options based on the fact that while SailfishOS is more open than Android or iOS, it is not fully open source.
By the way, it is also worth noting that unlike Google, so far Jolla has been moving in the direction of open sourcing more components of their OS. No one can predict the future, though, and some people would prefer to avoid any possible future vendor lock-in.
Well even though I do think there’s value in that despite Sailfish being partially closed it’s still a valid criticism.