No, the problem is always firmware, hardware, drivers... If everybody were required to publish specs for these SoCs and peripherals, we'd see competition and vastly different outcomes.

> N900.

The N900 would have had continuity with any number of subsequent devices, it certainly had the coders and the community. The problem was constantly having to reverse-engineer everything, so all of the projects got sick and died. Governments have made a special effort to preserve the monopolies of mobile carriers, manufacturers and OS vendors. They even carved out a mobile exception in the US for guidelines about net neutrality.

I think that governments, OS vendors, and telecom have entered into a partnership because they have a shared goal of limiting user control over mobile devices as much as can possibly be gotten away with. The OS vendors and manufacturers are interested in a captive customer base that is subject to their whims and policy changes. The government wants monitoring and editorial access to communications. Open hardware that runs standard Linux is absolutely impossible to tolerate if you have those goals.