[SailfishDevel] A kickoff meeting about SailfishOS, open source, collaboration, way forward @ 15 April, 15:00 UTC

[Robin Burchell]

On 05 Apr 2014, at 10:21, Thomas B. Rücker <thomas at ruecker.fi<mailto:thomas at ruecker.fi>> wrote:
Reading this I can't help but wonder if Jolla now claims ownership of
Mer/Nemo then. Even with fancy hat changing. Bringing this discussion up
in a strictly Sailfish context implies this.

I think you’ve read a little much into things, but I’d like to point out the obvious here:

Jolla are doing the majority of the work in these two projects. So purely in terms of governance and technical knowledge, they are in a position of quite a bit of power. Now, that having been said, the work on these projects has always (without exception) been done in the public realm, with the aim of collaborating with others, to some degrees of success. We’ve seen people make tools/hacks/fixes around that stuff, and that’s great. It might be improvable, but it’s a positive thing already.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, from a strictly open source point of view, the ones doing the work dictate the direction - one could even say this implies ownership, yes. But on the other hand, while I can’t speak for the entire company, I (and the folks I know and work with on a daily basis) have collaboration and cooperation at heart, even if execution could be improved on - which is what provided the impetus for this thread.

Power doesn’t necessarily mean dominance.

There are other downstream projects relying on Mer and I'd expect this
to be discussed with them, in a completely "vendor neutral" setting. Mer
used to be big about this, before it got dragged into a "ship a product"
race of one of the involved parties.

This is open source. We can’t dictate what other people do. And if we’re polite, we talk first, of course. I do think that some of the things you were replying to are about addressing a very real problem, though, which is that contributing to Nemo (and Sailfish, Mer, and the surrounding universe) has a lot of rough edges. It won’t be a panacea, but it’s something to start thinking on.
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