Please do keep in mind that Jolla is a small company with very limited resources. Maybe they choose to bind the licence to the Jolla account because it is much easier to implement than any alternative which requires a whole new system? I guess Jolla don't have the resources to assign such task to 4-5 people, giving them a week to come up with a solution - There are probably more important tasks to solve.

I still don't see what the problem is with checking the eligibility to use SFOS X during the install / first boot by logging into the (most likely used anyway) account and then "unlocking" the system. That's about everything that needs to be done to authorize the device, as long as the Jolla account is still connected. I guess you have to trust Jolla to not use that setup to "spy" on you (or collect data). But then again, if they want to do this they probably hide such "features" in the OS itself, independent of the account.
So if you don't trust Jolla to use the account to only validate your SFOS licence, you probably have a hard time using SFOS itself since you can't be certain of its behaviour.

That being said, I honor your beliefs in open systems and the critic that arises from it. Sadly, theoretical principles are not that easy to implement in the real world.

And now, back to the topic and the official SFOS build that we hopefully can download ind install tomorrow.