Sailfish OS cuts off its Russian presence due to Ukraine situation

As the situation between Russia and Ukraine evolves, Western countries led by the United States have imposed sanctions on Russia in the fields of economy and technology, and even extended them to areas such as culture, sports, and academia, which were previously advocated to be "borderless" and "not linked to politics." This makes people worry whether the open source field will also be affected?

(Image source: https://weibo.com/1564089110/LhJwnE0u3?refer_flag=1001030103_)

Recently, according to techcrunch, Jolla, the maker of Sailfish OS, the mobile operating system with the highest market share in Russia, is trying to cut off ties with Russia, which seems to confirm our concerns.

Russia's "national operating system"

Sailfish OS is an open source operating system based on Linux, compatible with Android applications, mainly for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, created by the Finnish company Jolla.

Since the core members of Jolla are mainly from the original MeeGo development team, Sailfish OS is considered to be the successor of MeeGo. MeeGo is a mobile operating system jointly developed by Nokia and Intel, but has long been abandoned by Nokia.

Jolla officially released Sailfish OS at the end of 2012, and launched smartphones and tablets based on Sailfish OS at the end of 2013 and 2014, respectively. However, Sailfish OS and its devices were not popular in the market, struggling to survive between iOS and Android, and Jolla, the company behind it, was also struggling to survive.

Until around 2015, as geopolitical competition intensified, BRICS countries, represented by Russia, began to actively seek new technology systems to replace Windows, Android, iOS and other operating systems dominated by American companies in order to get rid of the US monopoly on operating systems and information surveillance. The open source Sailfish OS thus entered the vision of these countries.

In 2015, Russia established a company called Open Mobile Platform (OMP), which is committed to promoting the establishment of a developer community around Sailfish OS in Russia to help develop more secure software. OMP CEO Pavel Eyges said, "Sailfish software based on open source code and independent is the future of mobile operating system platforms, and it has great development potential in Russia and other regions."

▲ On November 30, 2021, Russia's self-developed Aurora OS 4.0 was released, focusing on high security

In 2018, Russian telecom giant Rostelecom acquired three-quarters of OMP's shares (and also became the largest shareholder of Finland's Jolla) and developed the open source operating system Aurora OS (Chinese name: Aurora) based on Sailfish OS. So far, Aurora OS has become the mobile operating system designated by Russia's official military and political institutions and is widely used in all walks of life in Russian society. It is reported that in the Russian census conducted at the end of 2021, the Russian government equipped staff with 360,000 tablets equipped with Aurora OS.

Therefore, Sailfish OS is also regarded as the cornerstone of Russia's self-developed operating system in the mobile field in a sense.

Seeking restructuring to distance itself from Russia

However, for such an open source project that is so important to Russia's self-developed operating system system, its main creative team was recently exposed to be seeking asset restructuring to distance itself from Russia in response to EU sanctions against Russia.

Recently, Jolla CEO and co-founder Sami Pienimäki was interviewed by the US media TechCrunch. When asked whether he was worried about the impact of the EU sanctions on Russia on the company's business, he said: "We have actually reduced our business and exports to Russia in 2021. Therefore, potential technology sanctions will no longer affect Jolla's business. At the same time, Jolla's growth in the automotive field is particularly rapid, and it has become an important part of our revenue in 2021."

At the same time, Pienimäki also confirmed that Jolla plans to restructure its assets this year to get rid of the control of its Russian majority shareholder, saying that "the existing ownership structure hinders the company's ability to grow in Europe."

Jolla chairman Samuli Simojoki also released a statement on LinkedIn, highlighting the company's further steps to distance itself from Russia - hoping to find a new buyer for Rostelecom's stake, potentially from the European automotive industry or the Finnish government.

“The Russian-Ukrainian situation forced each of us to evaluate our own actions in relation to Russia,” Simojoki wrote, “For some time, Jolla has been looking for a shareholding structure that would significantly reduce Russian ownership… In the new situation, it became clear that the company had no future without a complete divestment of Russian ownership.”

Jolla was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the "joint strangulation" of Android and iOS, and survived by relying on huge orders from the Russian government. Russia has always been its largest market. Now, in response to EU sanctions against Russia, Jolla is even willing to "cut off its arm to survive."

Since Sailfish is developed based on Linux and inherits the GPL agreement to remain open source, Aurora OS developed based on Sailfish will not face the risk of supply interruption for the time being. However, the alienation of Jolla's main creative team is bound to have a certain degree of negative impact on the development of the project itself in Russia.

It is worth mentioning that Jolla also established the Sailfish China Alliance in 2017 with a Chinese investment group and signed an exclusive licensing agreement for Sailfish OS in China, in order to help China build an independent mobile system based on the Sailfish system.

This article is reproduced from OSCHINA

Title of this article: Affected by the situation in Ukraine, Sailfish OS cuts off its arm in Russia

This article address: https://www.oschina.net/news/184814