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Comment by metildaa | Hacker News Reader

Firefox OS has been rebranded as KaiOS, and its eating marketshare with $5 LTE bar and flip phones. Said devices are pretty minimally specced with a Qualcomm 205 and 128MB of Ram, but Mozilla did a great job optimizing for low end devices.

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To be clear, KaiOS was not rebranded; it was forked, closed sourced and further developed -- mostly to work with touch-less, feature phones. Mozilla is neither maintaining nor associated with it in any way.

How could an MPL & GPL licensed project be closed sourced? Mozilla didn't relicense Firefox iirc.

How macOS can be proprietary, while Darwin is open source?

By being mostly proprietary in new and important parts, built on top of an open foundation which itself is not the most valuable part for customers.

I suspect that key parts of Kai OS are proprietary, and the foundation left from Firefox OS is very basic. Important, but totally insufficient.

Actually, there's not been much change from the original fork of FirefoxOS besides the UI changes to be better for non-touch devices.

GerdaOS (LineageOS for KaiOS) allows people to import and run FirefoxOS packages without modification, though many apps will need some changes to allow it to work without a touchscreen.

The unofficial rumour mill says that with the extra investment from Google, KaiOS will probably shift to Chrome(ium) at some point in the future, but that's just a rumour and remains to be seen.

I doubt KaiOS would switch to Chromium, the focus seems to be using near zero resources while remaining somewhat fast.

Mozilla spent years with dozens to hundreds of devs working on getting it to be snappier than every other low end phone, short of Google paying for this type of dev work on KaiOS, there will likely be nothing more than security patches and cosmetic changes to KaiOS.

You are correct. The parent is mistaken, or at least exaggerating and at worst libelous.

“KaiOS is based on the Firefox OS open-source project and we are committed to abide by the rules of the applicable open source licenses.” https://support.kaiostech.com/support/solutions/articles/350...

Frankly, that doesn't mean much; the MPL allows one to freely mix open and proprietary files on the same project. Sure, they can't literally close Mozilla's code, but they can still make their forked project mostly proprietary.

In other words, Android is "open source" too. But I still don't have control over my phone.

You can install a plain AOSP and have (almost[1]) full control over your phone though.

[1] almost, because every smartphone needs proprietary drivers to run …

> every smartphone needs proprietary drivers

Free phones are slowly popping up https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

The librem looks nice but if I'm not misunderstanding, it's still pretty much vaporware at this point. I sincerely hope it reaches its goals though.

Next version of AOSP will have a smaller userspace.

No, you can't. Not when more and more phones ship with locked bootloaders and a smaller and smaller percentage of phones actually work well with some AOSP spin and none of the apps you use work without an unrooted, closed-source-Google-API-infested phone.

It means exactly what the license allows. Mostly proprietary seems a lot better than totally proprietary in the absence of open source alternatives.

It’s bizarre to me when people complain about things like “tivoization” or “open core”. These are by design or they are solved problems if the creators care for the trade offs.

That is the Mozilla community’s issue. They chose the licensing. They have revised the strategy a number of times. I remember when code was tri-licensed.

Or it’s also a consumers issue. Money talks.

But you cannot ever the source code of kaiOS. Despite several enquiries, they told me that ask the device manufacturer as we are NOT legally needed to provide you source. KaiOS is kind of open but not totally!

This actually respects the license. The person who provided you the binary (the phone vendor, not KaiOS) must provide you the source that corresponds to your program (not the git history). KaiOS must provide the source to the phone vendor on request off course.

That being said, this is the minimalist interpretation of the license, and not what is commonly understood as open source (where the repo is available somewhere, at the very least).

I wonder how difficult it is to get the source from the manufacturers. If it was trivial you'd think they'd avoid playing these games and just dump it as a tarball at the very least.

You just have to fill out the form in the disused lavatory next to the door marked "Beware of the leopard".

See https://github.com/kaiostech

So the repo is available! Thanks, I took @omnifischer at face value.

Looking at the commit history, they keep on referencing bugs in a private tracker though (I know I'm moving the goal posts :-).

I only know of one flip phone sold in the U.S with KaiOS. I had one. It was a terrible flip phone. And I know flip phones. Like, the flip phone of 10 years ago did not give you a delay every time you pressed a button. The KaiOS one did. It also did not have installable 'apps' as was the original promise of KaiOS. It's UX was generally very confusing (yes, flip phones have a UX; you notice especially when it's a bad one).

I don't know if it's doing better in non-US markets. But I don't think so; someone else _did_ take the Firefox OS source code which of course had an open source license, and adopt it and rebrand it as KaiOS. I am not sure what their aspirations for it are. Currently, I do not think it is the promise of what people hoped FirefoxOS would be (and may or may not ever have been).

I dont consider KaiOS a positive development. To me the biggest thing missing in Android that Mozilla could bring to the table is user privacy and the expectation of putting the user's welfare first (above data collection and monetization). Similar to Firefox vs Chrome.

I trust KaiOS less than Android in that regard.

Source for the supposed "eating" of global marketshare? I can't find any marketshare report that even mentions such an OS.

KaiOS is relatively successful in India, with 15% market share for mobile devices in 2018 (second place).

https://www.bgr.in/news/jiophone-kaios-surpasses-ios-india-s...

How exactly is that "eating up global market share"?

The actual quote was "eating marketshare with $5 LTE bar and flip phones".

Aren't Nokia/hmd featurephones all running kaios?

A failed OS is being paired with a failing Mobile manufacturer. Good riddance.

There seem to be Series 30 phones still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_30%2B#Made_by_HMD

The only Nokia phone running KaiOS so far is the Nokia 8110 4G (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110_4G).

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