I was really looking forward to checking FFOS out. But this article puts so much emphasis on carriers that I am a bit alarmed - I hope Mozilla manages to keep the FFOS open.
You can't have a smartphone without the support from carrier. Mozilla has to deal with carriers issue and this is why they really can't make FFOS available in North America yet (beside the fact that FFOS is still in early stage...)
You have to compromise with carriers and manufacturers without compromising user's privacy (FFOS tries its best to protect user's privacy, but certainly you can't do everything right?) Sometimes you have to choose certain hardware and certain price.
Mozilla is a giant but it doesn't ahve the resource Google does. So when it comes to negation, it depends on how much users Mozilla FFOs has.
The source code itself is open. Well the master copy. In the future there will be forks and I think Mozilla will keep its best effort to make sure phones running forks meet the standard (they are making such process, validation process to ensure Mozilla's standard is met before the build is released).
