I really like this. Other than an upvote I would very much like to express my support for this idea and I hope someone with connections to the halls of power passes it on, there is a lot of merit to this. It would immediately result in hardware manufacturers having to document each and every input and output of their hardware if they expect any sales at all and it would also do an end run around various monopolies.

Check out the idiocy around Broadcomm's WiFi/Bluetooth drivers on the Mac, it's absolute insanity, there are so many of them that to install Linux on one of the machines with such a chipset you need to copy your drivers from the Mac operating system (if you still have it installed...) in order to give Linux the ability to load firmware onto the devices so that they can work. Three different files iirc.