Anyone know the story of this KaiOS being used by Alcatel and JioPhone? Is it some sort of successor to Acadine’s H5OS? Are they a fork?
Yes, it’s another fork of B2G involving some of the same people as Acadine’s H5OS.
Figures. They have to remain open-source, though, right? Any idea where their repository is?
As far as I know they don’t have a public source code repository, at least not yet.
Many parts of B2G (especially Gaia) are under a permissive (Apache) license which allows modified code to be released under another license, so not all of B2G necessarily has to remain open source. It’s made of many components though so the legal situation is probably quite complex, there are likely some parts that Kai OS Technologies should provide the source code for.
I’d love to see them open source as much as possible, but I’m not exactly sure what the legal obligations are. Also note that it’s unlikely they’re able to continue using Gecko given the code they need has been removed from mozilla-central, so it likely won’t be booting to Gecko for much longer, it will be something else.
I would particularly like it if they released the source code for the lower layers so that we could build our own HTML-based UI on top.
I’d sure like to get one of those Jio Phones for evaluation. The specs look a bit better than those of Alcatel’s Go Flip.
FYI, they have an online git repo by GitLab:
But the only mention to FirefoxOS I can find is in their press kit hosted on Dropbox:
KaiOS is a new operating system for mobile. It merges the power of a smartphone with the affordability of a feature phone. KaiOS originates from the Firefox OS open-source project started in 2011, and has continued independently from Mozilla since 2016. KaiOS is backed by several tech and telecom giants and works with over 170 people from offices in the USA, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, India, France, and Brazil.
Unfortunately I can’t put that in web.archive.org for posterity.
So, since they have a web-based repo maybe they intend to share the source code that’s derived from the MPL, GPL and LGPL parts of FirefoxOS, and maybe other bits too.
Who knows 
Has anyone received any “Developer” information from them? I signed up for their “Developer Updates” a couple months back but never heard anything.
Now there’s word that the Jio phone has already gone out of production. It’s almost as though there’s some sort of conspiracy to prevent any phone OS other than Apple or Google from existing.
Wow! People still haven’t realised that they don’t need "native"apps, they just need good websites.
That’s a shame. I was hoping that India would be the place to lead the world in developing the next mobile OS. Now JioPhone and Intex Aqua Fish (Sailfish OS) have failed. What next?
More generally, I stuck my neck out and tried to get the GPL and MPL licensed source code for the Alcatel Go Flip. Alcatel told me they don’t have the source code and wouldn’t give me contact details for requesting it from KaiOS. I sent KaiOS an email using their website but didn’t get a reply.
If KaiOS is only Firefox OS 2.5 with a new Gonk then it’s not very interesting, but we can’t know if we can’t see it.
That was denied by Jio: http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/mobile-tabs/reliance-jio-is-not-stopping-production-of-jiophone-confirms-company/
Good news 