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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
