Is there a true Open Source Android phone? (drivers)

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The current situation with the Dream and missing drivers have made me think about the importance of open drivers also for embedded devices like phones. Anyone using the combo Ati card + a distro that upgrades Xorg or kernel more often than Debian stable (whics is most of them) have felt the urge to curse closed source drivers to the deepest levels of hell. Now the same **** hits the fans for G1 owners.

Even though tis post is not about Ati, I must say in their defense that they have released specs, which is great.

Qualomm however, has not released anything whatsoever when it comes to source or specs, as far as I can understand. I have been stalking enough development efforts on embedded devices to know that this is common practise from hardware vendors - and extremely annoying for any geek wanting to do some heavy development for them.

And now i finally reach the question, which has already been mentioned in the title: Is there any device, released or upcoming, that features a SoC with opensourced drivers and firmware for all components? If not (and guess it is so, unfortunately), is anyone better than the others?

Of the many phones/MIDs/ARM gadgets I evaluated before I got my Vogue, the only ones I saw that had even remotely open OpenGL drivers were based on TI's OMAP3 SoC or had a PowerVR SGX GPU. Unfortunately, none of the OMAP3/PowerVR devices I saw were cheap (OpenPandora, AI Touchbook, BeagleBoard, Nokia N900, etc.) enough for me. That, and I saw what happened with the TouchBook's OpenGL ES library, which apparently wasn't allowed to be distributed outside of TI's SDK - but I haven't been following that. I also saw that the Samsung S3C6410, used in the cheap made-in-China SmartQ5 and Q7 MIDs, has open enough specs for writing a driver, but no one has stepped up to write one yet. Aside from OpenGL, though, an OMAP3/4 based phone would be perfectly open... except there aren't many consumer OMAP3 phones I really wish reverse-engineering or converting the Qualcomm/ATI libhgl.so for "real" Linux wasn't next to impossible/illegal - if doing it was easy, you'd have an OpenGL ES library for Debian on the Dream by now. I would reverse engineer it if I had the resources, unfortunately I'm unsure how legal it would be to do that.

EDIT: as far as phones (as opposed to the non-phones I was talking about), the most open right now seems to be Qualcomm - not counting Marvell PXA or other feature-poor (opposite of feature-rich :P) SoCs - as contradictory as that may seem. If you haven't guessed by now, I'm basing everything on OpenGL drivers, since as far as other hardware goes, I don't have much expertise. Also, I haven't looked hard enough to find any Freescale- or other ARM SoC-based phones, and I don't know of any Android phones (shipped with android, not ported by third-party developers) that DON'T use Qualcomm chips. For the moment, it seems you must pay a premium for openness.

Well, thank for an insightfull reply anyway.

The N900 is definitely on my watch-list, but yeah, it sure is a bit expensive. Then again, it IS cheaper than the N1, So it isn't that bad.

As for the legality, it really shouldn't be legal NOT to give out open drivers for hardware when you sell it to consumers. They should have a legal right to have it! :P

But seriously, these outdated qualcomm chips in most HTC phones is no competitor to Snapdragon or Tegra, so who do they think they are fooling when they keep the drivers closed for "competitive reasons". Thats pretty much what they all us as an excuse.

Sad to hear about the "free" Touchbook fate though. I had high hopes for it, but if that is the stance they're taking now, I'm glad i didn't buy it myself.

Soooomewheeereee over the rainbooooow, coooode iiiiiiiiis freeeeeee (likeinfreespeechnotfreebeer) Soooomewheeeeree over... :P

In paradise there is no binary blobs in any code running on any of my devices.

Acer has just released the "Acer Liquid kernel source code". http://www.acer.co.uk/acer/service.d...CRC=2980211862 Liquid support under Document tab.

Hope that everything is there.

The GeeksPhone One is an open source Android device running on the MSM7225 processor, and worth checking out.

http://www.geeksphone.com/en/

The samsung moment uses the Samsung S3C6410 processor .... whitch is used in otehr windows mobile devices and i do belive samsung has a sdk advable but im not sure

I don´t know it exactly but shouldn´t be the OpenMoko a true opensource phone?

Isn't the Droid pretty decent? Doesn't Motorola even release the drivers for the hardware as open source here: https://opensource.motorola.com/sf/sfmain/do/home

The Moment has the same problem the SmartQ 5/7 have, unless Samsung released source code for the Android OpenGL drivers behind my back. That still wouldn't cover running Debian, sadly - I was hoping I could run Debian if I got one, but I know it won't be 3D-accelerated even if Debian does run. The Motorola Droid has pretty much the same SoC as the N900 and friends, hence the same PowerVR driver problems. IIRC, the SGX drivers are only partially open - I think most of the source code is available, but I remember hearing somewhere that there were redistribution problems. The infamous Intel GMA500 IGP (which was actually designed - and manufactured I think - by PowerVR) still suffers from poor-quality closed drivers, and Intel still hasn't done anything about it, pointing fingers at PowerVR for who knows what reason. I've come to a conclusion: hardware companies don't care about the consumer anymore

What's the status of this these days?

- how open are the n900 drivers?

The Nexus and i9000 both have a thing where the modem reads the CPU so that's as far as the reliant project goes.

Geeks phone is pretty cool but has binary blobs.

I remember reading about another project to make a phone like the Geeksphone but being prepared for compromise to achieve full openness. But I forget the name of the project. Anyone know what its called?

I'm really hoping there's a cheap Chinese phone out there that one can really own from driver level up now.