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Posts: 1,389 | Thanked: 1,857 times | Joined on Feb 2010 @ Israel
#383
Originally Posted by Copernicus View Post
Ok, I've been following today's discussion, and for some reason finding myself more and more confused. I think it finally gelled in my head with javispedro's statement:



So. As I understand it, we've got a fine, fully open-source OS base for mobile devices, Mer. And, there's even a fully open-source UI on top of this OS, Nemo.

To my knowledge, Jolla's Sailfish is not an integral part of Mer. It is, instead, an attempt to build a _commercial_ operating system on top of Mer, in very much the same vein as Android. (And, given Android's success, this seems like a decent strategy.)

Which leads me to the obvious (at least to my mind) question: why in the world would you want to open-source Sailfish? For those folks who want to see (and participate in!) a fully open-source OS, Nemo seems to be the way to go. For those folks who want to see Sailfish succeed as an alternative to Android, there seems little point in them opening the closed bits; they'll need to keep some items closed just to do business in the current environment.

Really, I see this as a perfect use of Mer, myself: one side pursues a commercial, closed-source UI on top of Mer; the other provides a fully open-source system top-to-bottom. Both approaches have their advantages. I just don't see the need to force Jolla to go full open-source as well...
Mer is just a core. It's like you would say any device using *nix or linux as kernel are enough opensourced (iOS and PS3/4 are based on opensource freebsd and a lot of opensource tools, but it doesn't help you, does it?)
There is a huge difference between functional OS that you can set on your phone and use (btw do you have and hw that is 100% supported by mer/nemo except jolla as they do not provide the way to flash) and set of tools to build your own (see it as LFS).

In addition they actually said they would open source before phone launch and few times later, they said it again before tablet campaign and their PR uses "opensource" word too much and not it a proper way. Marc in his video told that Sailfish 2.0 is open on campaign(and where Marc now :P)
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