[mpol]

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.

[cbolton]

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

[mpol]

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.

[m4rtink]

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. :)