I doubt CyanogeMod is going that far although I definitely think there is
probably a lot of criticism to be had here in the approach. That said what
I've done with ThinkPenguin hasn't been perfect either. It would be nice if
CyanogeMod at least drew a firm line in the sand on what the company would
and would not allow such that it pushed things a bit further. By that I mean
they say something to the effect of “none of the code we produce will be
released under a non-free license”. At least that way you can be pretty
confident the core of the software your running is free (at least if you
install it yourself).
I should point out that we had some time to play with a firefox phone,
http://stores.ebay.com/ZTE-Mobile-US
I think the good thing is the OS code is free. The bad thing is it includes
some non-free software. The ZTE Open I think we concluded (still in the
process though) the graphics component is free although the wifi is not. It
might actually be a good set of hardware to base a free software friendly
phone off if Atheros (ath6k) would release the source under a free software
license for the wireless. ZTE though has no plans to continue production
though. Now that isn't to say it might not be a good phone to base it off
though. The phone is cheap $80. It would probably be less than $80,000 to
$160,000 to do a production run (I think) which might put it in the ballpark
of something achievable. That is if ZTE would do another run for a larger
customer interested in taking on the financial risk of the phones not
selling.
I don't know if the phone could be made privacy friendly though. I'd put my
money on the phone's modem firmware having access to the main memory and CPU.
All bets are off at that point. Plus even if it didn't there is probably zero
chance that you'd be able to turn off the modem when not actively in use
(even if you didn't need to receive calls). If it were possible to separate
the modem from the phone to be closer in resemblance to a computer it might
then be possible to turn it off and on via the OS and in doing so it would
allow you to use the device to call out and/or check messages in such a way
that your tracking was fuzzed a bit (they'd only know you were at a certain
location at a certain time if you checked your messages / made a call vs now
where they always know where you are, what route you took to get there, etc).
