Rostelkom has absolutely nothing to do with it. The Russian interest (especially in the government sector) is to provide an alternative to the CIA/NSA honeypots that come with US agreements and litigation, a la Google/Apple duopoly. The Russian government (and other governments, naturally) don't trust products or services from Google or Apple, and rightfully so.

Meanwhile, run a tcpdump and look for suspect connections. Trace them back to their source and prove that the packets contain any data that violates Jolla's privacy policy, then I'll start to subscribe to your conspiracy theory.

More on the point, though, the vast majority of closed bits on Sailfish are the UX and arbitration using Android device drivers.

If you've a problem with unauditable code or proprietary binary blobs, I have some bad news for you:

Anything you use day-to-day has arbitrary code that isn't open to public scrutiny, unless you have the good fortune to own one of a handful of older Thinkpads (or a select few other notebooks) or some one-off smartphone with a fabled open baseband.

I don't think the bits like Alien Dalvik, Exchange support or XT9 should be counted, as they're licensed from third parties. Jolla open sourcing someone else's work after leasing it from them just doesn't make sense.

If you'd like to develop a completely open binary free handset with an open baseband and a completely open mobile OS, by all means. I'm sure there will be people lined up to pledge their support.