Can't say I have any interest in protecting "vendor IP" in their crappy camera drivers. Let vendors open their blobs! Closed source camera drivers will just reduce quality and increase bugginess.
This looks like a move to getting better support. The alternative is getting nothing.
Letting companies protect their intellectual property benefits absolutely nobody but them. They don't have our best interests in mind, only their own. The ideal solution is to reverse engineer their hardware's interface and produce a competing implementation which will no doubt be better than their minimum viable product. My laptop has a backlit keyboard with RGB LEDs and I managed to figure out how it works and make my own program to replace the manufacturer's. I'm so happy I don't have to boot into Windows just to use their slow software anymore.
They don't even have to give us source code. Documentation would eliminate the need to actually reverse engineer the hardware. They could just release that data and all interested parties would start hacking. The problem would take care of itself at no cost to them.
the point is to try to enact change in corporate behavior with regards to consumer devices.
>The alternative is getting nothing.
goes both ways.
If I don't buy a product that uses binary blobs all over the place, they don't sell the product to me.
Supporting products that support DRM systems natively does a lot to support the underlying DRM system, too. It sets a native expectation of DRM among developers, fostering the use.
And worst of all, I can't try to fix blobs without labor that is so intensive that it renders the very idea moot.
Wikipedia faced a similar issue when considering using https everywhere. Some countries were blocking certain pages on Wikipedia and https would break that so it was uncertain if they would just block the whole of Wikipedia now. As it turns out they mostly did not block the whole website and those selected pages became unblocked because the alternative was given by the all or nothing approach was too far.
When exactly did that work? In which project? All this attitude did was to make Linux unusable for many people, making it marginal and thus a smaller power at pushing companies to support and opensource drivers.
Things started changing AFTER more people were able to adopt it due to less black and white attitude of some distributions.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-...
https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gcc_vs_kernel_stability.html
There are technical reasons for this but it also serves another purpose: maintaining leverage over companies that would take advantage. The Linux kernel receives tens of patches every hour. If companies refuse to upstream their drivers, they are left behind and must pay the maintenance costs or drop support. Their products are worse for it.
I wish every free software project had this power.