Jolla talks Sailfish OS: why it can do what Nokia couldn't

CC: We're focused on smartphones. However, Sailfish is very flexible, and it can run on a wide range of hardware. We're creating the Sailfish Alliance which we welcome partners to join and people are welcome to develop Sailfish OS for their own hardware. This could be tablets or some smart TV etc. We've already tried running Sailfish on a variety of hardware, and there are sometimes tweaks and modifications needed, but, it's really easy to make it work. We can help our Sailfish Alliance partners to work on configurations.

LXF: Over the last year, we've heard of three Open Source phones (Ubuntu, Firefox OS and Sailfish). How do you see Sailfish fitting in to that?

CC: I think we are one of the very viable alternatives. I'm very happy to see these, I won't call them competitors, but different solutions that people can choose. When we talk to the different operators, they are a bit tired of just having Android…

We can offer them different software to match their solution. Actually, the Ubuntu phone has a very similar software stack because they're both based on Linux and they also use the Qt framework. We're happy to have discussions to work together to get things in common with Qt, so if you write an app in Qt it works on an Ubuntu and Sailfish phone. We want to make collaboration easy, but we also have to differentiate. We're focused on the OS but we also want to bring the best of Sailfish and put it on our phone and make really good hardware.

LXF: How receptive have hardware manufacturers and carriers been?

CC: We've had really good feedback. I hope that once we get more confirmation of who our partners are, we can make more announcements. Right now we're still in discussions with a lot of companies.