"mass market open phones"

There's a sad little part of me that wonders if this isn't like having a computer in your toaster. People may want a smarter toaster, but they don't want a computer that toasts bread. They want a toaster that works better. The old DWIM paradigm. Appliances have functions, and either work or don't.

Complicating the fact that it's hard to convince the general public that Free/open is something they want from the start may be the fact that a phone, even a smartphone, is merely an appliance. Even with a "long tail" of bells and whistles, its success as a piece of ubiquitous computing boils down to the fact that you can forget it's a computer. It has functions, not software.

That's obviously not to say that Free/open ceases to be a desirable feature, just that the user utility of Free/open has more to do with enabling. The closed ecosystems are good enough at selling their own enabling value without Free/open to make that extra "feature" a harder sell. Free/open becomes a thing for people who remember that it's a computer with software -- until and for as long as it fixes a problem with the appliance.