Linux (and other open OS's) have had to fight this from the very beginning. It may seem DOA now, but then Linux did too for a lot of people.
And while we still need the occasional closed source firmware blob or driver, there are now also systems where we can replace every little bit from the BIOS upwards with open alternatives.
In the mobile space, RockChip has released sufficient source to allow Ubuntu to be ported to the RK3188 CPU's (quad core Cortex A9), so there's movement. Given that RockChip is one of 3 CPU providers dominating the Chinese Android devices, if this helps their market share you can expect MTK and AllWinner (the two other main CPU providers) to be more open too.
That does not mean these systems are open - a lot of pieces still will be locked down often because they license GPU's etc. and don't have the rights to open up everything, but several of the Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers in fact do seem to want to make custom builds available (not least because a lot of these devices ship as XBMC devices - many distributors now ship with XBMC by default, and at least one offers to flash their Android sticks with plain Linux + Linux version of XBMC instead of Android)
And while we still need the occasional closed source firmware blob or driver, there are now also systems where we can replace every little bit from the BIOS upwards with open alternatives.
In the mobile space, RockChip has released sufficient source to allow Ubuntu to be ported to the RK3188 CPU's (quad core Cortex A9), so there's movement. Given that RockChip is one of 3 CPU providers dominating the Chinese Android devices, if this helps their market share you can expect MTK and AllWinner (the two other main CPU providers) to be more open too.
That does not mean these systems are open - a lot of pieces still will be locked down often because they license GPU's etc. and don't have the rights to open up everything, but several of the Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers in fact do seem to want to make custom builds available (not least because a lot of these devices ship as XBMC devices - many distributors now ship with XBMC by default, and at least one offers to flash their Android sticks with plain Linux + Linux version of XBMC instead of Android)