That gives me a lot of hope. At some pint the article mentions a "proprietary cloud service" which immediately made me worry that this would be a locked-up device.

If the underlying software is open source, that would also suggest that it if there is a large enough community, it will keep working for much longer than the company supports it. And it gives hope for better software fixes. For example, the writing-lag mentioned sounds like it should be solvable with better data structures under the hood.