Just looking at FairPhone, I don't see how they communicate or are anymore open than Jolla. There are a lot of angry people who pre-ordered and were given virtually no communicate as to when they would be getting devices. Secondly, the OS itself is still on Android 4.3 and hasn't been updated. At least with Sailfish, there is a steady stream of updates and users have been able to feed into improvements. Finally, FairPhone look to have their own closed source components (Google services components and FairPhone UI layer).

If anything, Fairphone is much less open in both the fluffy communication sense of the word and in the technical FOSS sense of the word.