I can't wait till we get to the point where you can pretty much buy any phone, download your favorite Linux/Android distribution, hit install and watch it come alive.
Phones are computers these days. And this is how we deal with computers, right? We keep installing Ubuntus, Fedoras, Windows, even OS X on any x86 box. We've got decades of experience of doing that.
The current phone market resembles the 80's home computer market: there were dozens if not hundreds different computers that were incompatible with each other. In the 90's the PC architecture had won and Linux started to be usable with the most basic components. In the 00's it became commonplace to be able to install Linux on nearly any computer you could buy off the shelf and expect 99% of things to work out of the box.
It would take till 2040 to reach this on phones if it took the same time. However, given the faster development and evolution of the phone ecosystems I would expect that we'll hit that target in 2020's or so. By then, the cpu+gpu+modem variations have converged to a few well-known architectures for which open source drivers are available. They might be slower or consume a little more power than the original drivers but nevertheless at least you can boot your phone with your own software that you downloaded somewhere.
We aren't even there yet on the desktop, plenty of printers, pci cards, etc are still undocumented Windows blobs.
It is this strange belief on the part of hardware makers that making the lives of FOSS developers harder makes them more money or something. Because they already wrote the docs - they have engineers that made the stuff. They just don't put them on pastebin or something.
Phones are computers these days. And this is how we deal with computers, right? We keep installing Ubuntus, Fedoras, Windows, even OS X on any x86 box. We've got decades of experience of doing that.
The current phone market resembles the 80's home computer market: there were dozens if not hundreds different computers that were incompatible with each other. In the 90's the PC architecture had won and Linux started to be usable with the most basic components. In the 00's it became commonplace to be able to install Linux on nearly any computer you could buy off the shelf and expect 99% of things to work out of the box.
It would take till 2040 to reach this on phones if it took the same time. However, given the faster development and evolution of the phone ecosystems I would expect that we'll hit that target in 2020's or so. By then, the cpu+gpu+modem variations have converged to a few well-known architectures for which open source drivers are available. They might be slower or consume a little more power than the original drivers but nevertheless at least you can boot your phone with your own software that you downloaded somewhere.