Jolla and the Hildon Foundation struggle to cooperate [LWN.net]

By Nathan Willis
January 23, 2013

The fallout from the dissolution of the MeeGo project continues to impact many in the Linux-based mobile device world. Former employees from Nokia's Maemo/MeeGo division formed a company called Jolla, pledging to pick up development and deliver a platform to mobile phone companies. But although Jolla has announced partnerships with device vendors, the company has been less successful at engaging with the still-active Maemo/MeeGo community. Add in the overlapping open source projects claiming ties to MeeGo, and it can be confusing to see how the pieces fit together. Shaking out the relationships between players is challenging for those on the inside, too, as Jolla and a major community group have recently discovered.

Million little pieces

When Nokia terminated its participation in MeeGo there were—to put it mildly—hurt feelings, among both the developer community and Nokia's MeeGo engineers. Some of the veterans in both camps followed MeeGo's other underwriter Intel to the launch of MeeGo's official successor Tizen, but others hedged their bets. Most notable was the Mer project, which forked the existing MeeGo code and vowed to continue it as a community-run project. Subsequently, Mer project participants launched the Nemo Mobile distribution, which added MeeGo Handset UX components to the Mer base system. Still, the project continued to advertise Mer itself as a general-purpose system equally suited to be the base for MeeGo, Tizen, or other platforms, including KDE's Plasma Active.

Jolla was formed privately sometime in 2011, but it announced itself in public in July 2012. Started by a group of former Nokia employees, Jolla advertised that it would "design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones." Since then the company reportedly signed a sales agreement with Chinese retailer D.Phone and hired several Mer developers to help develop the platform.

But details about the company's work have been hard to come by, with almost all information arriving through second-hand sources like interviews with executives published at blogs, or social media outlets like the company's Twitter account or Facebook page. The jolla.com site is an un-navigable matrix of Twitter and Facebook links that are dynamically loaded one screenful at a time via JavaScript. The site does offer a press release (PDF) from November 2012, though, highlighting Jolla's appearance at a start-up event in Helsinki. At the event, Jolla previewed Sailfish OS, its Mer-based software platform.

Yet there is precious little information in print about Sailfish OS; the site is a wiki that highlights Sailfish's inclusion of Mer and Qt5, but not much else. The QA page explains that Sailfish will provide hardware adaptation and a user interface layer that are not found in Mer, and that components from Nemo Mobile will be included as well (although not the latter project's UI layer). Video of the demonstration talks at the Helsinki start-up event are available on the Jolla Youtube channel, including a walkthrough of the software development kit (SDK), but the SDK has not been released.

The Mer, Nemo Mobile, and Jolla camps are largely composed of developers working on the core of the operating system. But one of Maemo and MeeGo's bigger accomplishments was its success at cultivating a large and active community of third-party application developers. As with the platform developers, some of the third-party application developers have migrated to Tizen, but a sizable contingent embarked on their own hedging strategy by forming the Hildon Foundation (HF) in September 2012. The name comes from the pre-MeeGo application framework from Maemo, but the group emphasizes that it, too, is happy to work with the other post-MeeGo projects, Mer included.

The chicken and egg salad problem

It might seem as if the HF and the various MeeGo-derived platform projects need each other in a big way; after all, a platform needs applications just as much as applications need a platform. But, so far, the disparate pieces have yet to link up and establish a strong partnership.

The HF took a step toward more cooperation on January 3, 2013 by publishing an open letter addressed to Jolla. The letter notes that one of the principal motivations behind the formation of the HF was Nokia's impending decommissioning of the maemo.org web infrastructure, which hosted discussion forums, documentation, and software repositories. The HF undertook the task of maintaining the sites, but had little success in raising the funds necessary to cover the hosting bills. The application ecosystem centered around those sites, the letter argues, would make the HF "a beneficial advocate for Jolla." To that end, it suggests the formation of a relationship between the foundation and the company:

We would welcome discussion about a relationship between our organizations… If anything, we would like to form a friendship. If Jolla would be willing to become a sponsor and aid us in promoting the open source software aspects of Jolla and Sailfish — or, possibly even foot the bill — we would offer valuable community support to Jolla. In fact, we see a huge possibility of the Hildon Foundation becoming a part of the Jolla ecosystem or Sailfish Alliance itself.

A Jolla representative responded to the letter with a comment on the post—one which was not overwhelmingly positive. "We can talk on a regular basis and we can form a friendship," it said. "But talking and claiming friendship is easy." Jolla is already providing financial support to Mer and Nemo Mobile, the comment said, projects with "very small budgets" and which:

...have based their operations around being able to do big things, with small resources, like a startup or community would – and not only with contributions from just Jolla.

For what we want to create and the world to come with Jolla and Sailfish – these projects are where you would want to be participating, to be in the front seat of what’s to come. Places to be true pioneers.

The reactions from other commenters to Jolla's reply varied; user Mark Z asserted that it amounted to the rejection of the HF's large pool of potential customers (by way, presumably, of the HF application developers' existing customers). Others, like joerg_rw, thought that a formal relationship was too much to expect from a new startup, but that establishing contact was good for the moment.

The HF board posted a longer response on January 10. The response seemed to take slight umbrage at the "true pioneers" comment in Jolla's reply, saying that "in all honesty, the Maemo community has been a true pioneer for many years now." It also laid out a case that Jolla, Mer, and Nemo Mobile lack the specific infrastructure elements that comprise the HF's mission:

Currently, neither Jolla nor any Jolla affiliates affiliates (Mer, Nemo, Sailfish OS, etc.) have any sort of "community," user base, or public space for communication to speak of. These assets can be extended if, for example, you are interested in a community repository, cross-platform development, or helping developers migrate to Sailfish. We had already intended to provide a public space for Jolla/Nemo/Sailfish and will continue to do so regardless. Would Jolla like to help with any of these efforts that will benefit Jolla?

So far, Jolla has not followed up with a second reply.

Whether time and the benefits of launching Sailfish OS on handsets in China will change minds at Jolla is anybody's guess. But at the moment, some members of the HF remain optimistic, particularly if Sailfish OS's Qt-based API is substantially similar to Nemo Mobile and MeeGo's. Logic would suggest that, at some point, Jolla will set out to cultivate an application developer community, and the Sailfish OS SDK previewed in November indicates that the plan is already in the works. One would simply hope that the company does not alienate the existing developer community between now and the SDK's public release.

On the other hand, Mer would seem to be a more natural fit for a partnership with the HF, since it too is a community-driven project. But despite its secrecy in other areas, it is evident that Jolla has financing, which cannot be said about the other, community-driven projects.

Whatever happens between Mer, Jolla, Nemo Mobile, and the HF, it is remarkable to see how durable the Maemo/MeeGo community has remained years after its corporate founder washed its hands of the project. Strangely absent from the discussion about how the above camps can work together is Tizen, which is supposed to be the official successor to MeeGo. The platform and the API differs considerably, but if anyone at Tizen is watching carefully, they may see an opportunity to step in and win over new fans and developers, since the other parties cannot seem to all get together on the same page.

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