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.
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…)
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…
On the positive side it’ll possibly be a great phone for postmarketOS.
Why would you think a company that offers a closed source OS would give out their drivers?
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.
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.
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.
💀
Nokia isn’t the same company as Jolla though.
It is the direct descendant of Nokia’s OSSO (“Open Source Software Operations”) division, both in terms of people and software.
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.
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).
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
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?
I hope they are able to get 25K pre-orders and expand their geographic sales coverage after that.
Same, it’s hard to get excited about a product I can’t buy
