There are no alternatives.

This ideology of open-source mobile OS goes back to Openmoko.

None of them managed to sell enough devices to keep a profitable business.

>"None of them managed to sell enough devices to keep a profitable business."

Nokia managed it with the N900 and the N9, the only reason they didn't continue is they lost their bottle and sold out to Microsoft.

If you were fine with "open source" on those Nokia devices, you should be happy with "open source" on Android.

Also as a former employee I can tell they didn't sell that much units, specially when compared with Symbian devices.

What he said. On top of it, maybe next failed attempt can try building on one of these for a stronger foundation:

https://github.com/ExpressOS/expressos

http://genode.org/

Tizen is an alternative, whether you like it or not is another matter.

Oh, you make it sound so simple. A platform is an alternative to dominating ecosystems if it exists at all. It having apps, locking you into Microsfot, or even existing 5+ years down the road doesn't matter? If that's true, there should be all kinds of people on all kinds of smartphone platforms right now instead of most of them on two.

Meanwhile, Tizen is available for people wanting whatever their changing offering is. I guess just budget regular rewrites in a new language/platform you had to learn into your FOSS app on Tizen with either few contributors or the more common zero. That's some great ROI.

KDE's Plasma Mobile? Like Ubuntu Phone/Unity 8 it's also using Qt QML to build flexible layout apps that support touch and keyboard+mouse.

https://plasma-mobile.org/