[SailfishDevel] Discrimination and abuse from Jolla employee Thomas Perl

[Ove Kåven]

On 22. mai 2014 15:05, Jarko Vihriala wrote:
> This is not about sweeping dust but please take your epistola to some other channel.

I would rather this thread continued right here.

As an owner of a preordered Jolla phone, and as an app developer, I'm 
quite interested in the behaviour and ethics of the company I have been 
supporting with both my money and my programming efforts.

If it turns out that this company is behaving as recklessly as it sounds 
like it is, then people like me should have a right to know that, 
nothing should be hidden from us.

In the time since Jolla's launch, many have complained that Sailfish 
isn't as open-source, and Jolla not as open and community-oriented, as 
advertised. Some of that appear to be changing now, which is good. But 
when the company officially treats a contributor and supporter as an 
adversary, and attempts to evade and hide the conflict, then that's a 
step backwards again in the openness department.

To some of us, openness is important for all kinds of reasons, not just 
for software, but in general. People like me want to work for a better 
tomorrow, a more open, tolerant, and inclusive world, with peace and 
prosperity, but that takes more than just good code. It also takes a 
good attitude.

And Jolla's attitude doesn't seem right. So now I'm starting to doubt 
that helping Jolla will help achieve my goal of a better tomorrow.

Sure, by his actions, Filip has probably harmed you and your image. But 
is that inherently wrong? Reporting a thief to the police or something 
will harm the thief, but it's still the right thing to do. For similar 
reasons, I think Filip has done the right thing here, regardless of the 
damage. It seems Jolla had several chances of preventing the problem 
from escalating this far, but evidently Jolla just wasn't a responsible 
enough company to do that. There's no reason the consequences for being 
irresponsible shouldn't be harmful.

Perhaps Jolla will improve. But whether they do or not is information 
that's interesting to me, in order to decide if this community is for me 
or not. Thus, I'd like to see what happens next, I don't want it hidden 
from me.

You could argue that this kind of thing should be on a mailing list 
without "devel" in its name, and that I could subscribe to that. 
However, if it comes to the point where Jolla decides it does have to 
create a whole new mailing list just for this one issue, that would 
imply that Jolla has been utterly unable to resolve the issue in any 
other way before that. (This would have been easy to resolve for most 
responsible companies, but Jolla just can't do it, apparently.)

So, if such a mailing list appears, I will take that as more evidence of 
Jolla's incompetence when it comes to dealing with people in a 
respectful and constructive fashion.

I'd rather see you go ahead and show that Jolla is still a respectable 
company. Express a willingness to do the right thing, even if you think 
all the proof is circumstantial or something. If you truly want your 
company to be "unlike", then following the rule book isn't the answer - 
being responsible is the answer.