I don't think there will be a problem with preinstalling any legal to redistribute and at least semi usable image that you may choose.

We will probably have some Debian BSP image for testing anyway, and what I said earlier about SHR still holds, so I'm fairly certain that there will be at least those two options available.

If by the time we flash the devices at factory there will be other options already available (for instance, if someone would already port something like Firefox OS using the early prototypes) then I don't see the reason to not offer such image as a preinstall option as well.

But keep in mind that we're not doing any support for the software, so there's no difference between preinstalling some image by us and doing it by yourself as a first thing after receiving the device.

We will however monitor the state of available software and do our best to help where possible - after all, even the greatest hardware platform is worth nothing without any reasonable software running on it - and this is something that was clearly visible back in Openmoko days. That's one of the reasons why we insist so much on N900 compatibility in hw - this way we can benefit from work done for N900, while otherwise we would need much bigger user base in order to even hope about decent software support from community.