What's missing from many of the mobile open source phone projects is ruthless project management. Without getting to what customers need working most , first instead of whatever I, dev, feel like can hold back any development timeline.

Firefox OS has hope because the folks at Mozilla are sharp. I'm sure others do, I just don't have first-hand knowledge of them to make any claims. Also, as far as NSA backdoors, Mozilla has the least likelihood of enabling dragnet surveillance. However it could be potentially leaned-on by Google, their largest revenue source, but a viable, popular handset maybe a way to negate that.