The Jolla Tablet: A Scam?

Open letter to Jolla community: through the though times

Well, I’m glad I didn’t push this one hard.

Comments at that post are brutal and frank.

Just three samples will do:

prometheus:

This is basically proof that tablet was the last thing that you had on your mind. Why did you create Jolla tablet campaign, and instead created Sailfish OS campaign? So we can say for a reason that you’ve tricked us. You wasted all the money on development of newer version of Sailfish instead of delivering what we paid…

And:

Moo-Crumpus

Earning money for tablets, but spending the money for software progress. I did not pay you for an software upgrade. Was the software necessary for the tablet? I don’t think so.

Therefore, afaik, this is a kind of embezzlement.

And:

Turbinenreiter

What are they lying about The crowdfunding money for the tablets wasn’t spent on the tablets.

It’s completely idiotic. They should have shipped the tablets, period. They had the money to do so. Nobody would have cared that the OS was still buggy and missing features. The community would have started hacking on it immediately and improved the OS.

Jolla used our money to build a closed source software product. We gave them our money to ship us a piece of hardware running Open Source software.

They screwed us over because they thought they can make more money by selling the OS to OEMs, than by selling hardware to us.

It’s obnoxious.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me — because he’s absolutely correct.

With over two million dollars raised, will this go down in the annals of Internet history as one of the biggest crowd-funding failures?

And what happens next? Bankruptcy? Can they release the source code for open source or is it tied up in legal ownership claims from investors?

This really just adds more poison to the well for other projects like this.

And I said it in my first post about them:

But what I don’t understand is this: Why build an entire tablet? Why not mimic Xiaomi and target a build of Sailfish for an existing tablet and offer it as firmware to flash? That’s how Xiaomi began, with MIUI for Android phones. Jolla wouldn’t have to begin with all the manufacturing headaches and they would have given people basically a real-life example of what their own tablet could be like. And then they could fundraise for it.

Exactly what they should have done.