Jolla News: Letter from Jolla, Open Source Sailfish browser

Sailfish OS is an Open Source project (sailfishos.org). On top of it, Jolla currently has a closed source user interface, but that's not the whole picture - according to Jolla, this situation is due to change in time.

With the latest update, Sailfish OS 1.0.3.8. Naamankajärvi, Jolla already introduced a new recovery menu which enables unlocking Jolla's bootloader. This was a step towards Open Source  - and today the story goes on. Letter from Vesa-Matti Hartikainen, Jolla Oy:

We finally got all the preparations done and today is the day. Sailfish Browser is Jolla's first fully open source application! The public repository is here: https://github.com/sailfishos/sailfish-browser We intend to work as open as possible and hope to gain contributors and a better chance of getting our embedding accepted to Mozilla upstream. Future contributions, both internal and external should go to the public repository. I hope that we will get a public bugzilla for this project at some point, but at the moment externally we will use Github's issue tracker. A more in depth description of the technology powering the browser can be found at http://blog.idempotent.info/posts/whats-behind-sailfish-browser.html. On behalf of Jolla's browser team I thank you all for being an awesome community and we are very much looking forward to building a great browser together! -- Vesa-Matti Hartikainen Jolla Oy

Open Source licence is added to the code already two weeks ago, but the letter above was published today. By this letter it's obvious that Jolla wishes to welcome more developers to contribute to the browser code, aiming to make it a full member of the Mozilla browsers main upstream. This would be a win win situation to both Jolla, their customers and mozilla.org.

Open Sourcing Sailfish browser was also expected because of the existing Gecko licence - Jolla's Sailfish browser uses Mozilla’s Gecko engine, and it's embedded with EmbedLite API.

News about Open Source Sailfish Browser has been welcome. Information was first published at Maemo developer forum, since then it's already reached at least:

• GIGAOM
• The Next Web
• CNN Money
• Several Jolla community sites, blogs and forums

Grants, by the licence of Sailfish Browser

Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license:

1. under intellectual property rights (other than patent or trademark) Licensable by such Contributor to use, reproduce, make available, modify, display, perform, distribute, and otherwise exploit its Contributions, either on an unmodified basis, with Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work; and
2. under Patent Claims of such Contributor to make, use, sell, offer for sale, have made, import, and otherwise transfer either its Contributions or its Contributor Version.

(note: for conditions, read the full licence http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/)