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Jolla announces "the other half" extensible backcovers as strech-goal to phone pre-order campain (forum.sailfishos.org)

submitted 2 days ago by Blaze@piefed.zip to c/android

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Other Half (TOH) is a swappable back cover that does more than protect your phone — it transforms it. The original Jolla Phone (2013) pioneered this with open I2C interface and NFC-enabled covers that changed themes and behaviour just by snapping on

(...)

With the new Jolla Phone, we’re taking TOH even further — and we’ll open source the hardware and software interface specs so anyone can design, 3D-print, or produce their own modules. Primarily we plan that the new The Other Half interface would be based on I³C.

top 16 comments

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[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)

and we’ll open source the hardware and software interface specs so anyone can design, 3D-print, or produce their own modules

oh cool, people can make open source "other half" add-ons for the proprietary "first half" of the phone itself 🙄

i wonder what percentage of jolla customers still mistakenly believe SailfishOS to be open source? (most of the ones i've met did...)

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, that kind of bummed me out as well. It's all about sustainability and then the OS is closed source, meaning you can't have custom versions of it after support ends...

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

On the positive side it'll possibly be a great phone for postmarketOS.

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why would you think a company that offers a closed source OS would give out their drivers?

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 1 points 23 hours ago

It runs om mainline Linux, generally better to get drivers supported upstream? Also it's not a zero sum game, they benefit from mobile Linux doing well as an ecosystem. Just because it's not open source doesn't mean it's irrational and evil. Not yet, anyway.

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well more recently they've been promising that they will slowly open source it. Not to say there isn't reason to wait and see on that but there's at least more reason to be optimistic now than if they hadn't even said that.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Unfortunately they've been saying on and off that they plan to slowly open source more of it literally since they first started... which was [checks calendar] now 20 years ago. So, I lost my optimism that they would ever finish opening it quite a while ago.

💀

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Nokia isn't the same company as Jolla though.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is the direct descendant of Nokia's OSSO ("Open Source Software Operations") division, both in terms of people and software.

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe so but being a single division in a company is very different from being an independent company anyway. I would also say that Jolla itself has certainly liked to portray themselves as "doing open source" for a long time but they have not had as concrete plans as the current ones for actually opening the OS up at any point in time before.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Got a link about it? Have they just said they plan to make it "more" open, or do they actually plan to make the full OS actually be free software, like AOSP, pmOS, or most of the other things on, eg, the pinephone software page? (note that sailfish is also listed there, but iiuc its UI and some other bits remain closed-source).

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah I think they've stopped short of really saying they're committed to making everything free so expecting them to open more but still not everything is probably what you can realistically count on... we'll see though.

This is the latest announcement I've seen on it: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/open-sourcing-proceeding/24689

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Thanks. Sorry to see my assumption was correct; that does indeed sound a lot like when they were called OSSO two decades ago.

Notably absent from the list of things they might open source soon is their current "Lipstick" UI, the graphical shell itself.

All of the stuff they plan to open source are things I didn't even figure out were still closed from my 5-10 minutes of research before writing my previous comments. It is difficult to estimate the number (do you know how?) of other small closed components which they can dribble out over the next years to maintain users' false hope that they will one day have an actually-open-source operating system.

we’ll see though

my advice is: don't hold your breath.

Sorry if this sounds bitter, but it's because I am - I naively believed that OSSO might actually ship a free OS one day (to be fair they didn't say they would either, but they helped us believe that they might... in effect saying "we'll see" for years while releasing bits here and there) and it was frustrating to realize that it was never a real possibility.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 16 points 2 days ago

Back in 2014 I had a Jolla phone with sailfish OS. It was cool, I was able to ssh into it and tinker with system and I wrote small QML apps for it.

Sadly some asshole stolle it and probable had to throw it away, because who would buy such a phone?

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I hope they are able to get 25K pre-orders and expand their geographic sales coverage after that.

[–] Lojcs@piefed.social 9 points 1 day ago

Same, it's hard to get excited about a product I can't buy