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For those who don't know, KaiOS is a closed-source proprietary fork of Mozilla's abandoned FirefoxOS for mobile devices. It's become extremely popular for low-end feature phones in the developing world.

https://www.androidauthority.com/kaios-phone-review-979286/

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Not sure about closed source part: https://github.com/kaiostech

Unless I’m missing something, none of KaiOS’s UI is there. I see Gecko, the kernel, some hardware enablement bits, and sample apps.

it's partially open source, so you don't get the stuff you mentioned.

How can it be closed source? What licence was FirefoxOS originally released as? Or you mean that they added new bits to it and kept them closed source? In that case, what's their rationale?

I think FirefoxOS was under the MPL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License

> As such, it allows re-licensing. MPL software can thus be converted into a copyleft license such as the GPL, or to a proprietary license (example:KaiOS).

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