Hello everybody, it’s my first post in this forum.
I still don’t own a FP, but I’m an inch away to buy two of them (for me and gf) and I’m specifically aiming for a Google-free solution. I’ve been part of maemo/meego community in the past, and waiting for the official support in the FP to Sailfish OS.
However, Fairphone Open Source looks to be a suitable alternative to Sailfish, with pros and cons. What’s the general opinion of the “open” community ?
Thanks
There is no such thing. You’ll always find people who prefer one or the other. There is no “objective opinion”. It will be best if you try both and see for yourself which you prefer.
Fair enough, but we may perhaps discuss pros and cons. For example, one of the biggest selling points from my point of view would be the long term availability. For which of the two options would you bet if you imagine yourself sticking with it for, like, 4/5 years ? Both are somehow risky as Android Open could face a hard life in case Google choices to make the next versions of Android more tightly coupled with their ecosystem, on the other side Sailfish project may fail as unfortunately already happened to their predecessors.
There is no real “open” with Android. And it’s a pain because Google and a few other big player dictate the speed and the development. The small players are too small and just struggle along waiting for the OEM giving them the latest Android. Sailfish is missing a few app controlling features/privacy and most normal end users only care about “apps” and not so much about “open”.
So in the end I think CM with a few microG replacements for the FP2 is currently the best option … but I have never used a CM phone before, so I don’t really know. 
I guess CyanogenMod wouldn’t be available as an official ROM, so support will be up to the community (this is good and bad at the same time). Also, it seems community custom ROM distribution is in a legal suspense at the moment because of blobs licences (can’t link related forum thread from the mobile site, I’ll edit later)
I’ve been using CyanogenMod + Freecyngn + NoGApps (microG) for about a year or more on my former Nexus 4. FPOS-OS is supposedly coming with a custom Recovery and root, so if you don’t need the extra CyanogenMod features and want official upgrades, I’d stick with that, flashing appropiate microG ZIP and the stuff you like.
What kind of alternative are you thinking about ? In which way ? I ask this because I don’t know much about sailfish OS.
I am not sure what you mean by quoting the word open the same way as I am sure how a general opinion of a community is as unlikly as a unique opinion of any kind of bigger community.
When I see myself as a part of an open source community then my opinion in general is better to have open source operating system than a closed one.
I would be interested to know why you would think that; can’t you just switch to the other system if one fails or don’t suit you anymore ? Or do you think you will loose some important apps data maybe ?
That is the whole point of having multiple options to me, and the added value of an open-oriented product: I will choose one (probably try sailfish as I don’t know it at all), and switch to another system if something does not suit my needs 
I quoted the word “open” just because I’m not completely sure it’s the right definition for the kind of users I’m talking about: users willing to enjoy a google-free, long lasting, open source operating system on the fairphone. Technically, both are almost entirely open source, even though Fairphone OSS has still some closed binary drivers. Practically, the development of one of the two is strongly driven by Google (which pursues its interests of course), while the other is more a “classical” open source linux based project, with just the UI coming in a proprietary module produced by Jolla.
Completely true, the more choices, the better. Problem is, if you stick to one of the two for a few years you may have a good amount of paid software bought for that platform which you would need to throw away, plus (more) a few years of technical and temporal investment in a platform. Let’s be clear: when you embrace a project like Sailfish you don’t do it for the ease of living, you do because you want to experiment bleeding edge technology, participate to the community, maybe write some piece of software yourself, be part of the “thing”. Having to throw everything away after 3 years is something more than switching over.
As I said in another thread I got the FP with the idea of putting Sailfish on to it. Since I have tried the altered version of Android I am not so sure. It doesn’t feel as bloated as other versions of Android I have used that were supplied by other vendors. Last Samsung I had there were a whole bunch of battery swilling apps on it that I could not use or remove. I would still like to try out Sailfish, but only if there is a way to switch back if I don’t like it.
@michaeljoy2: I tried the Sailfish OS community version, and really liked it. To get back to Android, I turned off the phone, started the boot loader by holding vol-down+power, and then followed the “Method 2” (fastboot) instructions for going back to Fairphone’s Android version.
EDIT: I’ve now gone back to Sailfish OS again 
Thanks so much! I might be more adventurous if I have a road back.