[zaphirplane]

I expect if google had that strength in position, they would. Perhaps that would lead to more fragmentation and less vendors releasing the latest android, leading to a highly dominant maker squashing the others and then having a stronger position in negotiating with google.

[thanksgiving]

Perhaps it would be more desirable to reduce dependency on blobs? What can we do to encourage manufacturers to release source for their hardware? I assume they care about selling hardware and the firmware is just incidental?

[dmm]

Even when full source is available it doesn't really solve the problem. Many of the drivers provided for android socs are very poor quality and would not be allowed in the kernel. Typical problems include not using linux conventions for config parameters(device tree) and duplicating large portions of existing kernel functionality.

Not getting into the tree is a problem because kernel interfaces change all the time. When someone changes a kernel interface they are expected to update all of the affected code, but out-of-tree drivers don't get that.