[MayeulC]

> strict licensing terms made it hard to get code upstreamed back

How come?

Right now, the phone ecosystem isn't perfect. It's hard to update phones. Why is that? Because manufacturers don't care about long-term support. But at least you could ask them for kernel source, fix their drivers and eventually upstream everything, like postmarketos does.

Now, with a stable driver ABI and permissive license, drivers won't get released. Hardware vendors still have no incentive to support old hardware, so bugs will remain unfixed, and hardware will decay as usual... Oh, sure, maybe you'll get one more update before reaching an edge-case in some driver? I also expect manufacturers to put all kind of ugly things in the kernel if no agreement with google prevents them to do so. Cue "branded" kernels, with drivers incompatible with each other due to some extra or removed APIs. And back to square one, but with only binaries and no source this time around.