>> open source handheld one day.

I would guess that this is beyond Intel's pay grade and it is a political/security decision.

Also except for selling openness, what else will sell that you couldn't do today ?

You can get a raspberry pi with an atheros chipset wifi dongle and you have pretty much a completely open source stack. It just doesn't look very nice to users.

>> Also except for selling openness, what else will sell that you couldn't do today ?

Anything that doesn't fit into Google's technical design / strategy that sells and customers like it.

Android has heaps of preconceived notions about how a handheld should work that are baked into the system and unchangeable.

If you are looking for exact examples of things that are not currently technically possible on android, how about a phone with a gps button widget that doesn't require you to leave the maps app to enable/disable gps or (not that I would personally pursue this) the ability to play video in a distributable app widget.

You don't have to have the processor to be open to do all those, do you ?

And the pi/atheros is open exactly because they're not a mass market product.

Raspberry Pi had sold 5 million devices by Feb 2015. It's a bit different from 7 figures per quarter, but I'd still call it mass market.

> I really hope someone manages to ship an open source handheld one day.

100% FLOSS mobile phones are available for sale since 2007 :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

The current revision (GTA04A5, ARM Cortex A8 1GHz) can be ordered at http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04

The Nokia N950 was also very open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950

There are also other also-run phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...

Cortex A8 is a proprietary design, no? How is that open source?

Why would you use Intel products if you wanted to build an open-source handheld?

I'm looking forward to the not-very-distant day that we no longer need to use Intel products so that we can build open-source laptops.

I just want to be able to call all the shots on the design of my product.

Intel has historically been very open on the desktop. Linux and computing in general wouldn't be where it is without that openness.

I suppose we have different ideas about what "open" means. In my view, Linux and computing in general have gotten where they are largely despite Intel's efforts at rent-extraction.

If it wasn't for the likes of IBM and Intel, with Linux developers on their payroll, even though they also do lots of patents and closed source stuff, GNU would still be looking for a kernel.

> GNU would still be looking for a kernel.

Linux came about before there was commercial interest. Linux (or GNU/Linux if you will) would have existed. Whether it would be in the same place it is today is another story.

I was there. We just wanted to have a free UNIX clone at home, to be able to do the work from there instead of expensive connections over the phone line to corporate and university servers.

If that was all you wanted, you'd still be running MIMIX.

Wintel provided the mass market that enabled the economies of scale that drove down prices. Linux has piggybacked on that.

Linux was written for the 386....

It would be great if RISC-V and other open CPU architectures dominate the CPU and SoC market, but that is going to be a long time coming. lowRISC seems to be the best chance for that.

http://www.lowrisc.org/

RISC-V seems to be lacking on the software side, e.g. where is the upstream support for Linux, GCC, or llvm? There is support in FreeBSD, but only because one of the FreeBSD committers was able to work on this full time (I've been providing advice to him as I ported FreeBSD to arm64 & have an office next to his).

I also have issues with the fact that many parts of the ISA are optional. A general purpose OS needs some common level of support by the hardware. If it can't rely on some features it makes it difficult to support the different SoCs.

IIRC there are ISA changes that need to be finalised before the support goes upstream. The support is already developed and available on github though.

Intel has the best documented GPU.