Strange question to ask, indeedy.
Surely they want to cover their costs.
Unless it was asked on one of the hundreds of unofficial Jolla pages that sprung up.

I'm pretty sure they've got all bases covered in that respect. Unless there's some obscure outfit that's trying to operate on some offworld frequency with a hexagonal SIM card.
Otherwise it's throwing the whole "Open" thing out the window.

No no no and no.

...i throw a heartful "yes" in the mix

I don't think so to be honest. When I look at my smartphone using friends, they actually value a more stripped down user interface. Infact, if they were given the functionality of an N900, they'd just end up being more confused (in general). Being honest about it, 90% of what they do is Facebook/Whatsapp. A few use Twitter. A few use Instragram. A few use the web browser (it always surprises me just how little the browser is used). They may occasionally play the latest games (Angry Birds, Draw Something, whatever is the latest flavour of the day). After that, other apps don't really matter. The reality is that a significant proportion of smartphone users would really be just as well served by owning a feature phone. They don't know that of course, so they will sign themselves up to 24 month contracts at $50 a month because they fall for the marketing hype of having the latest Iphone.

As for doing anything productive on a phone, you need only look at the most popular apps for proof that most people have no interest in doing real work on a phone. The trend is always going towards less content, rather than more content. Blogging for example is a dying technology at the moment. Why? Because if you want to make a decent update to a blog, you need to spend at much, much more time than the 20 seconds it takes to write out a Tweet. Even RSS and news apps are being killed by Twitter. Twitter is always first and most users would now rather get an update in 140 characters than having to sit and spend 2-3 minutes reading an article. Instagram has taken things to the next level because it has completely done away with writing anything at all - you just have to upload a photo and share it with your friends.

I understand the irony of what I am saying. The smartphone is essentially dumbing down mobile technology and that the internet will eventually consist of looking at pictures of cats that look like Hitler and reading about what Justin Beiber is doing.

The point that some seem to be missing here....
Is that all indications are that the entire stack of Sailfish* will be more open than anything else on the market (yes Ubuntu too), aside from -perhaps- Android & FFOS**.
And the latter is really in a different league/category of devices & sw_dev anyway...
If Sailfish can get the slightest bit of traction, then longer-term it'll definitely be more open than Android, but initially that'll probably have to be curtailed somewhat.
So if folks aren't happy with certain design paradigms, it'll be far easier for users/co's/interest_groups to fork & offer something else, or contribute towards refining/overhauling the existing UX.

*not the Jolla specific flavour of Sailfish ofc
**& no Tizen doesn't come even close & OpenWebOS doesn't even count at this point, & the stack of Android may be just as open, but the ecosystem as-a-whole most probably won't be.

Jolla Confirms It Will Show Its Debut Handset Next Month And Kick Off “Pre-Sales Campaign” For Fans After Mid-May

Facebook updates:

Jolla Mobile are asking this. I thought that they are not the official Jolla FB channel?

Now they saying "sales start" in H2 2013, I hope they're not using that to worm out of it "being in some users hands" by Dec.

2H means two hours?