Developing native apps today means accepting guidelines
and restrictions that potentially limits what services
can be developed, and how they should look.
...
Firefox OS aims to extend the freedom of the internet
into the mobile ecosystem, by allowing anyone to easily
create a web app at the same time that they create a web page.
Firefox OS is a vehicle to fix that by building all of the phone's apps out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and in doing so defining the gap between native apps and the web.
The ultimate goal is to bridge that gap with open standards. A great example is the JavaScript vibration API: http://www.w3.org/TR/vibration/. It's already landed in Webkit, too! https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72010
Mozilla can make sure these sorts of APIs are supported across desktop Firefox, Firefox for Android, and Firefox OS, but we're not trying to do this alone -- the goal is for open, inter-operable standards to win.
They certainly think plenty of people are smart enough to contribute (though that was a nice ad-hominen attack on the Android team).
Open-washing. Now there is a great phrase. As if there was a "one true definition" of open, and Android was abusing it. Could you let me know who controls this definition?
I've been contributing to open source and free software projects for 14+ years now, and they all have had different levels of openness. So I guess half of them were just "open washing"?
It's really great that you can speak about this as if there was general agreement in the community on what it means for a project to be open. Instead, from where I sit, there are different people who think it means different things.
Beyond that, Mozilla's also submitting all of these new APIs for standardization, so that any app you build that uses them could potentially function in all browsers.
As for Single-Sign-On, Persona can already take care of that, today, for virtually any domain / browser combo. You can help out on that, too: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid
The future will be even better if the Tent and Diaspora folks make it easy for their servers to also function as Identity Providers for Persona's protocol. FWIW, it seems like there's interest on both sides to make this happen.
(edited to remove slangy word "rumblings")
Also what has been done to make sure they can update any handset running Firefox OS independent of the manufactures and service providers?
I believe an alternative mobile ecosystem not centrally controlled like iOS and Android, but rather with a standardised core and fragmentation / innovation on top is a very exciting model. It's working great for the web, why is mobile fundamentally any different? It beats having to program every application three times from scratch to reach a full market.
How are you going to counteract the interests of Apple/Google and other established players, who are going to hold onto their turf with all the power the network effect will give them?
Truly open might be messy and a little scary for some people but it means that diversity and open access can thrive.
Android only goes part way towards this idea while still trying to maintain control and influence over several key (money making) parts (I don't blame them). This hybrid approach to being open however doesn't sit well with all users.
Instead of spending time making apps you spend time porting.
Each modified version also has its own proprietary market.
My question is, how will Firefox OS prevent this same problem with a 100% open system
[1]: https://github.com/comoyo/comoyo.github.com
[2]: http://jekyllrb.com/
All in all we are very happy with Jekyll (and looking forward to development picking up on it now).