If so, good job by Tim Cook to pressure them into greatness in worker treatment. Right?
With the massive sales and the high margins that are in every analyst's wet dream Apple could double what it pays for assembly with ease and without huge hit on the bottom line. But they don't care enough.
This will be low margin/low volume devices initially with which mozilla - a non profit organization that wants to open the door to the internet on the poor people of the third world while preaching platform openness and standards. So maybe people are ready to cut them some slack for some time.
Also maybe they are produced in (slightly) better conditions than iphone just based on the fact that the volumes and pressure are quite lower than on the iDevices assembly line.
The fact that you could turn a story like that into an occasion to attack Apple critics makes you look like some Apple fanboy with delusions of persecution.
Oh sure, anyone could be a fan of FirefoxOS, that wasn't the point of my comment. I was just pointing that one would have to be twisted to turn this story into an Apple fanboy fight.
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuKylin
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuntuKylin
Business relationships make for strange bedfellows, and I'm sure Mozilla has some serious preconceptions about working with Foxconn, however it should be comforting that we're moving beyond the world of Microsoft/Apple/Google dominating consumer electronics.
I don't think the parent was making a comment about either China, or FOSS, but about Foxconn, Apple (their most well-known and largest customer), Mozilla, and people's perceptions of partnership with Foxconn seeming situational.
On a personal level, many people chose their friends/acquaintances based on these sorts of things. On a consumer level, there are many examples of popular boycotts (for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement ). On a company level, many companies consider things such as environmental or social duties when deciding who to do business with.
In all cases, it could be because you hope that such a decision will cause change (e.g. organised/promoted boycotts) or it could be simply that you don't want to support something bad, even if knowing that refusing to spend $1 on some Nestlé chocolate (for example) probably won't change a thing.
Nobody fight for everything, choose a niche and fight for that.
My point is that just because human rights is not their goal, it doesn't mean it can't be a consideration. And if Foxconn, rather than being a company with a somewhat poor track record regarding its staff, was a company known for funding terrorism, arms sales, etc. then I don't think anyone would be arguing that people shouldn't do business with them.
Then there are the newer competitors, like Tizen and Ubuntu Touch, that it'll still have to face off against. There's very little, if anything, to put it above even these.