Opennes's nice but is it single-person hackable or huge monolithic blob that nobody except the most skilled teams would dare to bite?
My problem with Android is that I miserably failed to hack it alone (I wanted to mess with app permission system and make it work my way). The Behemoth seem to have quite a steep learning curve, so I quickly lost my way in its innards.
However, I was able hack Maemo (except for proprietary parts) on N900 somehow. Stack was loosely coupled, everything's deb-packaged separately, many components are not in-home inventions but are well-known software (Debian base, X11, OpenSSL, DBus, etc.). Sad thing Maemo's practically dead.
Despite much of it being proprietary Nokia's S60v3 platform, a Symbian derivative, was/is if not easily hackable (due to the whole certificate business) then at least very easy to write basic apps for. This is thanks to a great Python interpreter [1]. With it I built an RPN scientific calculator with a custom GUI and years later a remote control program for Motion [2] in about an evening each, including (re)learning the API. Thanks to PED [3] I was even able to write small text-based programs on the device itself (though I'd recommend against that if you don't have QWERTY phone; programming on a Nokia N73 was hard enough back in 2007). If you happen to have a phone that runs a variant of Series 60 give Python a go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60. The final 2.0 build sadly broke some networking code. There were very few people complaining, so it didn't get fixed. I suggest using version 1.4.5 instead if you choose to play with it.
Haven't tried one (don't have the readily compatible hardware), so can't really tell.
However, from what I've heard, it's Cyanogenmod 10 with Dalvik parts removed and some Ubuntu parts (no X11, Qt5 only GUIs) running in a sort of chroot environment. Doesn't sound much better than any other chrooted GNU install.
Count you in on the openness alone? Who are you, RMS? There's already an extremely open OS out there. In fact Firefox OS is based off of it. You can download the source code, build it yourself, and submit patches. You can even change the default app store. It comes with a rich app ecosystem and a beautifully designed and responsive UI. The latter two are what people in the real world care about when choosing a smartphone.
Listen, I'm don't expect miracles from Mozilla on their first attempt, but the Mozilla PR and fanboyz put their reality distortion field in overdrive in this thread. The Mozilla Marketplace is a joke compared to iOS or Android app stores. And I've heard Firefox called a lot of things, like sluggish, slow, unresponsive, but responsive has never been one of them.
If Mozilla pulled a last minute rabbit out of the hat, then I'll gladly admit my error. 6 years after the Original iPhone and with much better hardware, you’d think it would be possible for Mozilla to do this. Though it seems more likely the constraints of HTML5/JS will keep this from happening on low-end hardware.
My problem with Android is that I miserably failed to hack it alone (I wanted to mess with app permission system and make it work my way). The Behemoth seem to have quite a steep learning curve, so I quickly lost my way in its innards.
However, I was able hack Maemo (except for proprietary parts) on N900 somehow. Stack was loosely coupled, everything's deb-packaged separately, many components are not in-home inventions but are well-known software (Debian base, X11, OpenSSL, DBus, etc.). Sad thing Maemo's practically dead.