According to the RBC Newspaper, The Russian Ministry of Communications has decided that the country needs a national phone operating system which accordingly will be Jolla’s own Sailfish OS which has been built from the scratch and the ashes oc MeeGo after the death of the mentioned OS announced by Nokia as The Burning Platform.
I can’t read Russian or Finnish, so I can’t get into the details here, It’s supposedly part of a greater push by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Sounds like good news for Sailfish.
likely security concerns are behind this.
The Finnish wording of the deal is making me think Russia will work on a fork of sailfish.
I was wondering if that would be the case (without being able to read Finnish). I guess we’ll learn more later.
The reason for this action is probably mainly security-related (as andrewclunn said above), but I suspect the Russian government can’t resist the urge to put their own back-door into whatever OS they choose.
I’m speculating without knowledge here, but they could probably modify the underlying (open source) components without having to tamper with Jolla’s proprietary code.
They don’t need Jolla for that. All the open code in Sailfish is Mer which anyone can use without asking Jolla about it.
This was also my thought exactly.
Has this ever worked? Has any country really taken on significant development of an os? I’m sure they would like this to happen, only time will tell if they really commit to it financially.
Only case I know of that has somewhat worked is North Korea and their custom Red Star linux-based os. That should tell you something right there.
I don’t like how South Korea keeps pushing Android.
They have Samsung and LG, so of COURSE they’re going to push Android.
They were able to compete with the winphone o.s. for (third place in) market share with Bada/Tizen for a while but just not in Western markets.
While they haven’t given up there doesn’t appear to be any sort of significant push.
At this point in time i would much rather go with a FirefoxOS device than a Sailfish device.
Why?
Firefox OS has the same issues as Android, Windows and Mac/iOS.. they are controlled by US corporations.
This doesn’t sound very encouraging. Anything “official” with governments makes one expect all kind of backdoors. I hope Jolla know what they are doing.
Edited 2015-05-18 16:14 UTC
What _doesn’t_ have backdoors in it these days? You can’t trust anything electronic anymore. Seriously. “Monitoring” and invasion of what used to be called privacy is completely out of control these days. You can’t leave your house without being tracked. Hell, you can’t even sit on your couch without being tracked. Or recorded by your spytv, I mean smarttv for that matter.
How anyone could be surprised by anything is beyond me.
Oh, so pretty much the same as you would expect from a reasonably sized company then?
Worse, because there’s no insentive for a government to improve. What are the subjects going to do after all, switch to a different government? At least you have competition among companies which, while not always worth much, is more than you’ve got with a government which must compete with absolutely no one.
No one here in Brazil knows a thing about Sailfish. Not even in the tech community.
However, it seems like they will push this through a new agenda: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/18/russia-ios-androi…
Well, lack of recognition can be viewed as a problem or as an opportunity.
Personally I’m interested in Sailfish for probably the same reason as the Russians: it isn’t controlled by American corporations (I know they are after me!!!) Good luck to them!
I am so glad that my government does not bless me with a ‘national operating system’. At least they are staying out of that.
Shhh. They’ll hear you.
Well, maybe that’s because they already have the inside track and don’t have to dabble with a national OS.
I mean, referential status.
If people want to use phones using either iOS or Android then let them, but it is good that Russia is making the effort to be less dependent upon US-based companies. Even if the Russian government wasn’t concerned about their citizens’ privacy, they should at least be concerned about their country’s secrets.
Russians are wanting more localized version of sailfish and seems to me that Jolla is delivering
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/19/8624901/russia-mobile-os-sailfish…