Let's not jump on FFOS neck especially in lieu of recent news. If anything it's way more open than Android is.
Not really, Android was ridiculed for its severe lack of polish and poor performance. iOS lacked plenty of features, arguably Android 1.5 surpassed it in terms of a bullet list of features, the experience was just awful.
I saw your point just fine and my comment related to it directly. The part you're ignoring is the landscape surrounding those two events. There simply weren't established players in the smartphone market at the time that bothered innovating.
Currently, there are. That makes what FFOS is trying to achieve in their 1.0 and what Android was trying to achieve in their 1.0 completely different and nearly incomparable, which was my point.
As for FFOS reaping the benefits of the ARM race, isn't that the same thing comparable to OSS developing due to MS hardware vendors race to bottom price and maximum performance?
Yeah, it evolved. But we're actually two steps ahead of the end of that page now. iOS & Android are leaps and bounds ahead of what they were at 1.0. Really the only point you've demonstrated is "Wouldn't FFOS be sweet compared to Android 1.x?" and the answer to that is yes, it would be. Android 1.x was terrible. But that isn't the landscape it's being judged against, and nor should it.
Not only that, FFOS wouldn't even be possible then. What made FFOS possible was the mobile revolution and renewed interest in pushing the limits of what ARM and associated mobile technologies could do. Turning 1GHz ARM chips into commodity hardware, which was the direct result of the growth of iOS & Android.
Will FFOS evolve and grow? Of course. The question is will it do so fast enough, well enough to catch up, exceed it's competitors in a manner that's so compelling, it stands a chance to actually gain a foothold? Judging by Windows Phone, WebOS, Symbian and Tizen, the answer is almost certainly no.