Sailfish Alliance is the open alliance established in 2011 by Jolla company to support the MeeGo ecosystem with new products, services and business opportunities around or using Sailfish OS, a Linux operating system combining mer with proprietary components from Jolla and other parties, for various purposes and mobile devices. And to continue the development of the Linux MeeGo ecosystem, which the Sailfish OS is a part of.
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The alliance is seen as a competitor to other groups like Android's Open Handset Alliance.
Alliance
In 2011 some of the MeeGo team working at Nokia left, and were funded by Nokia though their "Bridge" program to fund spin-out projects by ex-emloyees. The Sailfish Alliance has sought to collaborate between the Finnish software developers, and overseas handset manufacturers, some of which are in China. The news media reports that a number of manufacturers in China and India want an alternative to Android.
The Alliance aims to "unite OEM and ODM manufacturers, chipset providers, operators, application developers and retailers."
Participants
The Sailfish Alliance is open with constant invitation to join, for both contributing in and/or just for the effects can be used (like results of the cooperation and contributions of other partners). Hence list of participants and their status de facto is fluctuating from time to time. Due to business reasons not always collaboration and details is publicly widely known. So far the partners in the Sailfish Alliance were following:
Business strategy
The aim of the Alliance is to offer unique differentiation opportunities and sustainable competitive advantage for OEM and ODM manufacturers, chipset providers, operators, application developers, retailers and other interested in sides.
This alliance is part of Jolla business strategy of free gathering 3rd parties, not necessary bound with partnerships or other agreements and also not necessary for contributing in Sailfish OS development. Besides the OS possibilities participants were motivated by Jolla model's advantages of open source and open community collaboration like: cost reductions, improved service for the customer, sharing skills, knowledge, specific resources towards providing new products and solutions which could not happen otherwise. This is the first time a business alliance conception was used in this way with meritocraticly governed Jolla's model and for open source and open communities. Its important parts are:
Uses
The Sailfish OS can be used for many kinds of devices like mobiles, computers, notebooks, tablets, navigations, smart TV, cars and in-vehicle infotainment, yachts and boats, household devices of many kinds etc. - this is similar situation as with MeeGo.
Jolla's Sailfish OS works in a tablet too. In November 2012 it was said that "we could see Sailfish tablet, but Jolla itself will on this first wave (note: of devices to be delivered to markets) concentrate on a smartphone".
Software Overview
The Sailfish OS software development kit (SDK) uses Qt with virtual box for development and it can be used with various systems like Linux, iOS or Windows. This approach allow for development with Sailfish SDK when a host computer is running other OS. That mean best skilled can be involved as inside SDK they have provided with emulation the full Sailfish OS environment for development or testing new products and this process is separated in VM from host resources. This and the open source nature of SDK allow to shape and rebuild it for particular and specific needs of a company or an organization or a group of developers, what allow to create context specific environment (eg with unique procedures, resources, restrictions or methodology implemented into it). That approach and abilities allow for collaboration and cooperation of even entirely different organisations with different limitations and routines used internally, but following rules they agreed for collaboration externally to obtain expected effects.
As Jolla's Sailfish OS uses the Mer core distribution, then various hardware and architectures can be used like Intel, ARM and many others. It is possible because the Mer core distribution does not contain any kernel, but libraries above the kernel and below user interface (UI) layers. To make a working Linux distribution, a kernel compatible with a particular hardware and UI are to be added – this creates the distribution of Linux Sailfish OS for any particular hardware or any specific purposes. Also this allows Sailfish OS to work on every hardware with appropriate kernel. Because of open source basis and rules, this can be used by all interested in using of those solutions e.g. to adopt for a particular hardware or any special needs.