They promised the world, their management didn't understand what OSS meant. It was pretty bad early on.
Their investors also didn't understand OSS and thus made sure that core parts never became OSS.
That's why there was NemoMobile, it was (is?) a true and fully open source implementation, replacing all the proprietary Sailfish bits.
It could have been great, but many mistakes where made in many places, not just by management. Now it's a fringe OS, with a closed source UI and no noticeable market share. Let alone growth in such.
NB: This is based on my personal involvement up to 2015-ish.
I'm still considering what to do with git.xiph.org and trac.xiph.org, and gitlab is one of the options. One thing I know for sure, just as with Videolan, a proprietary licensed solution like the EE is out of the question.
Minnowboard Max has the same unobtainium problem like the HiKey. That said, it's about to change.
Luckily also there a second manufacturer stepped in and the 'Turbot' version was recently announced. Same as the LeMaker version of Hikey, should have less of the usual Circuitco Unobtainium problems.
I got mine from Arrow(US) in July. They suspended shipping at some point after that due to missing FCC tests, but you could still get the board if you signed a waiver.
The HiKey board has different pros and cons.
Pro: It's received a lot more engineering time, as it was the first 96board. Actual open source first stage bootloader, from what I can tell.
Con: WiLink8 WiFi; Initially unobtainium as "produced" by Circuitco in homeopathic doses; HiSilicon also needs quite some proprietary blobs for things.
So far ALL 96borads have their problems and surprisingly all of them seem to violate the LINARO/96boards spec in multiple ways.
The board should be prepared for current measurement instrumentation.
Details can be found in the schematics, that finally got published after they were sitting around on them for a few months.
Not publishing the schematics and a couple of other things are actually violating the grand LINARO 96boards compliance spec, but nobody there seems to really give a f...art.
Have you retried with a more recent image? After I kicked them about the USB Ethernet situation Ndec enabled a few more drivers for the kernel in the Ubuntu images.
Both my ancient Pegasus USB1.1 and a newer USB3 GBit card then worked out of the box.
The WiFi situation is indeed annoying and I've complained about it, they seem to be since looking into it, but as the driver is open source, someone else could check too and send patches. There even is a debug tool to intercept the proprietary QC driver commands (used in Android images). It should just be reconfiguring the filters away from their broken default state.
Purely for the record:
http://ape3000.com/ipv6/ - a site that tracks IPv6 deployment in Finland was updated and the "will deploy native for launch" has disappeared next to Sonera and now it says "A schedule for native deployment is not known".
So yeah, one of the largest ISPs decided not to give the slightest f. and will just stick to a half-arsed 6rd deployment, it seems.
yes, that person transferred me and then one or two more transfers later I had some actual tech person who went "oh yeah, we do IPv6, I think, it's a business feature. How you get it, I have no clue."
It took another two months of probing and poking and unanswered call requests to B2B sales, to find out that in theory I could get a business connection, but it would cost me 10x as much with the only benefit being native IPv6. (It would be still over a crappy VDSL2 line at identical parameters).
Last time I asked a technical(!) sales person at TeliaSonera about IPv6 availability they asked "Did you mean IPTV?".
That pretty much sums it up and they are notably not ready for the "launch", but the launch page implies it's a staged roll out to ensure network stability. I read that as "we couldn't be bothered to get things done in time like the other ISPs". Notice how e.g. DNA just flipped a switch and went bang.