Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | mpol's commentslogin

1. A company needs a positive cashflow to keep existing.

2. Closed parts of Sailfish are being opened up slowly (There are new owners).

3. The tablet was in 2015, 11 years ago.

4. They are not Russia owned anymore, but Finnish now.


I gave another try to check for any open source update, it is not and added more mess. See here https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/Open_Source/ :

“As described in the architecture documentation Sailfish OS consists of a variety of components, some of which are proprietary and closed source (such as some hardware-specific kernel modules, or other software licensed under commercial terms), and most of which are open source.”

They removed open source components from “architecture documentation”

The os is impossible to build and test like linux despite of being based on open source project like linux, wayland, QT, etc.

SailfishOS is closer source than Android. Android you can compile and degoogle it.


Here what I found:

As of late 2023, Jolla, the Finnish mobile software company behind the Sailfish OS, was acquired by its former management team. They bought from Rostelcom. So they sold to Rostelecom and original management “bought” back. The original Jolla Oy company filed for bankruptcy in 2024, but the business operations and employees were successfully transferred to this new management-owned entity in late 2023.

More details here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Jolla-Acquisition-By-Managemen...


1. Positive cashflow can be made in a honest way if they really wanted to make a difference. By now yhis project would boom and overtake apple and android, not the case. They even sold to Rostelecom and Yandex. 2. New owners? More open? Any evidence? 3. Time doesn’t fade facts.

You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)

To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.


That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.

The firm with partly russian ownership went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The russian fork of the software lives on as AuroraOS in their local market but the current Jolla has no ties to russia.

> current Jolla has no ties to russia

That we know of. We live in interesting times. I wish they were more forward with how they've made it so they're protected against such interference.


There is a Wiki maintained by users. In short, it depends :)

https://sailfishos.wiki/books/compatibility-list-of-android-...


Could AI write a highly specific camera driver or GPU driver, without any documentation at all?

Probably not and why would it need such constraint?

Not even humans can do that. Documentation needs to at least be reverse-engineered and understood before implementation.


Because these are the major types of problems that pmOS solves?

I'm sure it could generate a decent device tree

Can you?

In a sense that book is more about selfhelp, and misses some parts of Stoicism.

An interesting book which is more complete but still readable is Stoic Notes written by Rymke Wiersma, translated in English here: https://modernstoicism.com/a-free-book-stoic-notes-by-rymke-...


So far it reads as a light introduction and sales pitch, which is fine.


Honestly, most modern books on Stoicism read like that; I tend to avoid them altogether. Although I will say that Donald Robertson has done a great job with the two books I've read of his (Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor).

The best modern book, in my opinion, is Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel. It's primarily about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, but does a really good deep-dive into Stoicism (and frequently mentions other Stoics).


Don't all cars in the Netherlands have at least a small checkup before inspection?

I once had a Fiat Panda from 1984, 20 years old by then. It had a small checkup and maintenance, then went for the inspection. It passed, but was highlighted for inspection from the controlling organizing. The mechanic, owner of the shop, started getting really nervous about losing his license, asking, is the car allright, is it really allright? And it passed inspection again.


Wero is coming. Currently it is only available in a few countries.


And within those countries in only a handful of banks. We've been here before, but as of right now, I'd give it a better chance than I'd have given just four months ago.


No it's not.

Wero is another name for iDEAL, it has been pushed by Dutch, but it is an engineering fiasco.

There is no way Poland would adopt it. Blik is just on another level price- and feature-wise.


I am unfamiliar with Wero. Can you explain why it is an engineering fiasco?

Side note: Looking at their job listings I don't see any engineering positions (with the exception of a security engineer which is a grey area in a bank IMO), only managers and business roles.


I see one engineering job ad https://careers.epicompany.eu/jobs/6909459-senior-full-stack... if we can call EU Digital Wallet speculation "engineering".

But you just answered your own question.

Wero is a money extraction business that secured European Commission support. There is no engineering nor payment system to it.


what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.


Old Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website.

I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.

In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.


Sounds more like you have some axe to grind

https://epicompany.eu/members


Others joined quite recently, indeed.

Wikipedia gives an overview by year.

As for the axe, I have no personal interest.


I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free. It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.


The big European countries adopt it, so if Poland will adopt it or not won't matter in the short term, in the long term merchants will accept it as they do it with Alipay and other more obscure stuff


I recently heard of Wero and it seemed promising. What makes Blik so much better in your opinion?


+1 for Wero! Unsure where I can see their timeline.


Wero is a land grab by the banks who fumbled building a PayPal alternative for 20 years, now desperately trying to stop the digital Euro.

Sure I'd rather use Wero than PayPal -if it was decent- and building it on top of SEPA instant transactions is neat. But the lack of buyers protection is a deal breaker for me! And quite frankly I'd rather use a digital Euro governed by the ECB than some rent seeking hobby project by a bunch of private banks. Especially because they will inevitably enshittify it with ads and hostile BNPL like PayPal.


Way too complicated for me :)

I just have 1 text file with monthly data. Each month is on a separate line, with only 5 columns (expanded below).

  1.date   2.saldo  3.savings  4.delta  5.special income / outcome (heading line)
  1 31 january 2026
  2 500
  3 2500
  4 -80
  5 dinner -50, concert - 30, sales +80, trousers -80, etcetera
Where the date is the last day of the month that I need to make (the next day there is income, for me it's 19th, not 31th). Saldo is my bank account that day. Savings are, well, savings in a separate account. delta is the sum of special income and outcome. row 5 is all special income and expenses. Groceries are not listed, I need them every month anyway.


There is the Gemini PDA from 2018 which has a physical keyboard. I heard it was mostly a disappointment.

There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.

All with Sailfish, the spiritual successor of Meamo/Meego from Nokia.


Mostly a disappointment? The keyboard is fantastic. I can tell because I have a Cosmo Communicator (successor with 4G) and Astro Slide (successor with slide mechanic and 5G). The keyboard of these is great, but... they got barely no support, and the company who build these is like AWOL. Either way, like the GPD Pocket series, the keyboard is larger compared to the Nokia N900 (3G) and Nokia N810 (WLAN only)

> There was another phone with keyboard around the same time, but I forgot the name. That was claimed to be very much in the spirit of the N950 and its cancelled follow-up, the Nokia Lauta.

Probably F(x)tec and their successors. Those have a similar small keyboard as Nokia N900 and Nokia N810

There's also the Hackberry. This device uses a real Blackberry keyboard, with custom firmware. It works together with a 3D printed case, and a RPi CM5. This keyboard, while small, is very ergonomic.


It was mainly the investors that didn't want to move. Many things were stagnant that needed moving. Now that the investors are gone there is a chance to move things, and slowly things are moving into open sourcing their software.


That's nice, thanks for mentioning it. Is there anywhere we can read about this?


The Open Sourcing? There is more about it on the forum for Sailfish with phase 1, the weather app, notes app and a few other bits:

https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/open-sourcing-proceeding/2468...

Then there is community news category with updates, but it's a bit haphazard and ongoing in this context:

https://forum.sailfishos.org/c/community-news/25

The Camera app, Gallery app, Nexcloud accounts and other accounts components are open sourced and on github. There is now talk about Silica, the Wayland compositor. It hasn't been updated well in recent years and there is talk about moving it to Weston or Wlroots, while also supporting xdg-shell for GTK applications.


This is really nice to finally see this happen! It has been super awkward that often small bugs and messing features persisted for years for the sole reason of the given app being closed source, so the permanently busy Jolla engineers just could not get to fixing it & the community couldn't help withou source & license enabling them to contribute.

It never made sense not opening everything up from the start - did they really thing someone would just clone it and made bank if they themselves usually struggled to make the whole thing work financially.

In my opinion it was most likely the combination of the combination of three things:

1) The race to release the Jolla 1 ASAP back in 2013, resulting in a messy codebase and systems not setup for community to contribute.

2) Then clueless investors got involved, especially when they needed emergency funding after the Jolla Tablet debacle in IIRC ~2015, blocking Jolla from opening the full source.

3) Constant firefighting preventing engineers on actually opening things up and setting things up for people to contribute & actually review the contributions in timely manner.

So good to see things finally improving. :)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: