Firefox made sense from a business point of view (in the sense of making something people want, never mind its search bar money) because it had a lot of features that IE lacked, such as tabbed browsing, not being the primary target for hacking, and its cross-platform support. Those are reasons people actually used Firefox.
Firefox OS doesn't make sense the same way, because they aren't making anything that people want. As far as I can tell, it's a way for Mozillans to testify their faith in JavaScript.
For a lot of people, the appeal of Firefox at the time was that it was developed by a company whose primary goal was to improve the internet as public infrastructure.
With the mobile market being dominated by Google, Microsoft and Apple, Firefox OS makes sense in the same way.
For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo, and are not spied upon by default.
For carriers and hardware vendors, it is about building a platform that is not 100% controlled by Google. Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)
Oh, and yes, it's also a third thing: it's designed to be a cool platform for [web]developers.
>For users, it is about building a platform in which users are not locked to a proprietary silo
How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?
>Recall that Google can decide to revoke Android license from any vendor on arbitrary grounds, and if you lose your Android license, you pretty much lose everything (no AGPS, no Google Maps, no Google Play, etc.)
While this is shitty, it still just leaves you pretty much in the same place as FirefoxOS (being able to access (some of) those services through a web browser rather than a native app). If a hardware vendor is worried about losing the licence to use the native google maps app, why would they move to FirefoxOS - a platform without a native google maps app?
The entire project seems more about politics and religion than an actual business case. Which is fair enough, but isn't a recipe for commercial success or market penetration.
> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs? If the answer is that the apps are 100% web standards compliant then users already have web browsers that can run those apps without needing to use FirefoxOS, so what is the point of FirefoxOS for users?
Because the other platforms don't support all of the standards developed by FirefoxOS, and will have no incentive to implement them without competition. Basic economics.
> How are they not locked into the 'silo' of FirefoxOS and the FirefoxOS APIs?
FirefoxOS is fully open source, while the Google platform is not. At the very least, that provides an environment where the source code for all the official supported platform is Free Software, which isn't true for Android.
This means that all users could share the same experience without depending on proprietary software (except maybe for drivers and BIOS specific to the hardware platform).
So instead of losing all the Google apps with an Android fork, let's throw away all the other Android apps, too! That sounds like a great way to kick off your fine-grained-permissions-having phone project.
Firefox OS doesn't make sense the same way, because they aren't making anything that people want. As far as I can tell, it's a way for Mozillans to testify their faith in JavaScript.