Aurora OS is based on Sailfish but owned by OMP

After a long time now, Jolla is finally financially positive. That situation is a result of Sailfish OS being licensed or sold under a different name to developers around the world. The most prominent software developer that bought the rights to use Sailfish OS is the Russian Open mobile platform or short OMP. The company was super kind to provide us with more details of the business model they did with Jolla, and how their Aurora OS got created.

OMP developed Aurora OS which is now used as an OS for smartphones and tablets offered to government and other businesses, but they also created the whole software ecosystem based on Aurora OS like server/cloud infrastructure that runs bigger products like Kaspersky, VPN, Messenger and other corporate software. There is approximately 400 000 devices with Aurora OS are used in Russia. You can check B2B terminals, rugged smartphones and tablets for corporate use that OMP is selling in Russia here. It is good to mention that OMP or Open mobile platform is a member of international opensource communities and an active participant of Linaro TrustedFirmware.

Aurora OS is considered by OMP a spin-off of the Sailfish OS, something like Sailfish OS is to Nokia’s MeeGo. Jolla actively helped OMP to establish R&D centres and expertise, but the whole fork of Sailfish was dome by OMP. But, developers at OMP are actively contributing to the development of Sailfish OS by working on their own Aurora. There is also a post on Jolla’s forum that shows how many things that were developed and ported to Sailfish by the Aurora OS community.

Sailfish and Aurora share the same roots, but there are some differences like Push notification service and security model. But, those two mobile phone OS are developed independently and by separate companies. The release cycles are also fully independent and there are no legal obligations in terms of licensing since Open Mobile Platform owns Aurora OS source code in full. There are common parts in two OS that are either open source or free of interest from either party.

The best thing with this deal is that both companies collaborate in the development of their OS systems because of the common interest in software ecosystem inter-compatibility

Allow me finish with a quote from Jolla’s sailfishos.org: “Aurora OS is an independent, “standalone” product and derivative work of Sailfish OS, and property of Open Mobile Platform LLC.”

 

Huge thanks to OMP employee for providing me with the insightful data of Aurora OS and its relations to Jolla’s Sailfish.