Well in one regard they already did a variation, when the original G1 was being designed it was a deal breaker if the blobs for the radio couldn't be distributed.

That said, one of the interesting "advantages" that Samsung and Apple get here is that they are their own SoC vendors. Google will have to get into this game eventually.

>That said, one of the interesting "advantages" that Samsung and Apple get here is that they are their own SoC vendors.

Both Apple and Samsung heavily use Qualcomm products. The Samsung S4 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. It should say something when Samsung isn't using it's own Exynos for it's premiere flagship device. The S4 also features a Qualcomm 4G LTE modem. And a Qualcomm power management chip. And audio codec.

The iPhone5 is almost as Qualcomm heavy itself, too.

I think Samsung and Apple would have equally as difficult of a time trying to release binaries (or source) as well, regardless of who is designing or assembling the SoC!

iirc QCOM chips are used in about 30% of Samsung smartphones (iirc the highest end ones?). The rest are Samsung chips.

I would be surprised to learn that Samsung did not use Qualcomm modems and other more minor parts.

I don't disagree with your last point per se, but it seems weird that it would be necessary. For very tightly integrated things, I can believe that vertical integration is the optimal solution. But having to vertically integrate just because doing it any other way requires dealing with shit vendors seems to suggest a rather poorly functioning marketplace. If all Google wants is an off-the-shelf product with non-onerous licensing, but the only way to get that is to actually acquire a vendor because nobody will sell otherwise, that comes across as at least somewhat troubling.

It is not really surprising that a market with very high barriers to entry can be poorly-functioning. They usually are.

It's not that weird if you're the SOC vendor. After all, if you withhold the blobs, then whenever people want a newer operating system, they have to buy a new device. The last thing someone like Qualcomm want is for you to be able to run Android 5 on your 2 year old device. They like the current throwaway model just fine, thanks.

To tell whether or not it's a poorly functioning marketplace we'd have to know how much more Google was willing to pay for more generous licensing terms. My guess is $0, because the benefit for Google is questionable.

This is a very good point. When Android was first released, it was a unique opportunity to study the relationship between an open source RIL layer and the underlying RIL library, in part because you could build and run Android with the RIL library. There are tons of claims of secret sauce in RIL implementations, no less than there are for GPU drivers.

The Nexus question was about permission to distribute the proprietary blobs - free software drivers (in the case of Ubuntu Edge) is a different problem.

Google could always use chips only from vendors that allow redistribution of the blobs, make it a contractual requirement when commissioning Nexus devices.

There's no need to be pointlessly snarky. Nobody has any idea how many units of the Ubuntu edge will "sell", because it's not for sale yet. It's ridiculous to consider an $800 commitment to back a product which will exist a year from now at best a "sale".

This was not a comment on ubuntu edge per-se, only the likelihood of it actually having free drivers at launch if they are only kickstarting 45k units.

The same thing would be true if it sold a million units.

This implies a dramatic lack of competition in the SoC market if you can't shop around and find a vendor that will at least provide release images to flash devices with openly, if not actual open specification devices with FOSS drivers.

There is a dramatic lack of competition. We find ourselves in the odd position of hoping Intel will come in and shake up the market.

Which, I presume, is why to my knowledge they've never said that they'll "try".

Mark Shuttleworth said this in his AMA: "In future generations, it would be great to see if we can do an all-open device, for example." -- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...

"So in this first generation Edge, no, we didn't look for open hardware specifically. We can choose silicon with more open drivers as we finalise the spec"

If you assume that they're doing something that they haven't claimed to, then you can continue laughing at nothing, I suppose.

Then I see mixed messages. " '... we'll ship this with Android and Ubuntu, no plans to put proprietary applications on it. We haven't finalized the silicon selection so we're looking at the next generation silicon from all major vendors. I would like to ship it with all Free drivers.'"

Sure sounds like "we'll try" to me

I don't think it's a problem if you're willing to use less capable hardware. Think Intel i7 vs. Lemote Loongson.

Yeah, but what smartphone vendor is willing to take a 20x hit on performance in exchange for open blob licensing? Performance sells phones much more than blob licensing ever will.

The Nexus devices are supposed to be developer devices and should therefore have other priorities. An unlocked bootloader is not enough for a developer phone.

They are getting to use a popular OS free of charge though, seems like Qualcomm would have very little negotiating power.

They don't need negotiating power. Qualcomm can tell Google to shove it -- the Android code is still published under the Apache license and as long as they don't claim to have written it themselves, they're free to do whatever they want with it.

Google could certainly tell LG/Samsung/HTC that a condition of getting the next Nexus deal is that all binaries must be able to be freely distributed by Google and let them put pressure on the SoC vendors, but I doubt the Nexus line sells enough or drives enough profit for anyone to take such a threat seriously.