Is there a Desktop Environment that you want to use or do you plan to create your own? I’m asking because most DE are made for screens at least 10" big.
The “Essential Applications” you mentioned in the Survey, do you plan to create them by yourself or do you plan using existing ones? If yes, are they gonna be open source?
What about a Browser? Office? Gallery App? They need proper touch support too.
What are your thoughts about Android Emulation? Jolla does this with their Sailfish OS and Blackberry too. It could be a good thing because there are not much Linux Applications made for 5"-7" Screens and Touch Input.
And can you tell something about the hardware you are planning to use? I’m interested to know why exactly this hardware was chosen.
first of all, notice that this is still research phase but I will try to answer your questions:
Probably U-Boot
plasma-mobile is the current favorite but maybe we end up working with GNOME community to bring their interface for it
we usually aim not to fork much (or better to say we try to go with what FLOSS world offers) but we can easily end up filling some gaps if we find them (or fork if that works better for our case but decision are made case by case). All will be Free software.
add your opinion to survey
currently we don’t plan any Android emulation (but even if we did, it would only be for F-Droid compatibility)
Gnome apps are more and more focused in desktop mobile convergence and applications like Web, Music, Photos are not doing bad at all in a small touch screen. They are well maintained and should keep getting better and better even on mobile devices.
Plasma Mobile is based on Ubuntu Touch anyway, but Canonical has CLA on all its work so that is a huge stopper for people who care about Free software (and we don’t need to fork it because of Plasma Mobile basically did it).
CLA is their license agreement which means all contributors to Unity (directly upstream) must sign it, which in turn means all contributions belong to Canonical and that is bad because they can turn it into proprietary software at any given point without asking community for input.