That's assuming you have a method to unlock it, you can't always necessarily count on that.

I can kind of understand why they don't want to release it until there is a reference implementation and the software is somewhere near done.

They don't want to suffer the same problem they have done on the desktop where there are a load of device out there which are "kind of" supported and they get a bad rep because somebodies sound , wireless or whatever doesn't quite work as they expect and they have to field a load of support requests and people proclaiming that their OS is "too hard" or whatever.

> That's assuming you have a method to unlock it, you can't always necessarily count on that.

For a long time, we couldn't count on video cards or sound cards being compatible with Linux either. The Linux community just shared information about which computers were most compatible, with the most open hardware, and we bought those devices.

The same thing could happen with phones. Even without being installable on EVERY device, surely some of the manufacturers will stick to fairly standard hardware and the Ubuntu community will see to it that the drivers and unlocking tools are there. Not everyone will be able to get Ubuntu on their phone, but the community can still thrive.

The problem though as canonical seems to have discovered on the desktop is that there isn't much of a business model for catering only to a geeky community of enthusiasts.

I think there's a difference between catering to a geeky/technical audience and leaving an entry-level developer feature available. We want these devices (tablets, smartphones, etc) to be little computers, but they aren't and they won't be without basics like a usable bootloader. With such basics available, the geeky/foss/linux/etc community can at least tinker and adapt existing software. At the moment most of the effort is proof-of-concept chroots and just figuring out how to boot a custom kernel, never getting as far as hardware support. Device manufacturers are laughing, happy that none of them can be used as computers. It means a new sale for a slightly different UI feature (wasn't the point of computers changing the software - including the OS?). IBM didn't intend to make a general purpose PC - they just wanted to be in the game, so they sacrificed controlling the integration. Thank goodness for that, because it led to the PC as we know it. Tablets and smartphones are convenient, but they are still not computers. All the parts are there though... All they have to do is leave uboot on. It doesn't mean the UI has to be made for a geek; it's negligible effort, and I hope Ubuntu ushers in that change.