Maemo and later Meego yes... I had a Nokia N900 and it was an awesome phone. Basically Debian in your pocket, easily accessible terminal with root etc.

Have you heard about helicopters?

I'd recommend scheduled tasks instead. Why be involved at all? :-)

I never said anything about Onyx, I don't own one but have considered them. They look nice and open.

I do own a couple of Kobo devices though and just wanted to say it's not running Android of any kind but it's still relatively open. Especially compared to phones, tablets and Kindle. The firmware/OS point you're trying to make is irrelevant there and I think you know it :)

There is NickelMenu and you can telnet into it. You can also install other OS like KOReader easily, it doesn't have a locked bootloader or anything like that. So imho that's pretty accessible and open.

We are talking about the Kobo right? It's not running any kind of Android or AOSP fork.

No it's not running Android.

Using Calibre you could probably glue that together. I wouldn't want Android on an ereader personally.

It's not open source but it is easily rooted and you can install custom add-ons or even replace the os.

If it's important that it keeps running then it should just be redundant and taking one node down for an update shouldn't be an issue. I know this is wishful thinking for a lot of services but I refuse to be on call for something if the client can't be bothered to make it redundant.

That's no longer a technical process issue but more of a teamcoach/HR kind of issue then. You should be able to assume good intentions from colleagues, imho.

We use a CI pipeline check which prevents merges to master if the code contains a TODO. A precommit hook only works if the developer has the hooks configured.