Like many folk who’ve been watching Google’s gradual shutdown of AOSP and alignment with Apple in terms of platform lockdown, I think the days of fully open devices are actually coming to a close. Again, I applaud the FSF’s initiative, but you need to get a lot of buy-in for this kind of thing to work—-manufacturers, developers (both OS and app devs), and, of course, users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.
And you can’t do a lot of those on an unlocked boot loader (which I think is going to be the logical consequence of replacing bits of the OS) without more hacking. It’s like XML and violence—-it will only lead to more of the same.
I expect the usual amount of “you can do that with web apps” pushback, but let’s be real. Except in markets like India where simpler and vastly cheaper platforms make sense, you either use iOS, Android, or… nothing but voice calls, and I don’t see enough here to make me think this will be something for everyone.