@larsmb @neil
fully agree, nice dream, but not happening at the rate at which new devices are brought onto the market and old ones disappear; inherent to the nature of the component market and consumer device price pressure.

So, not really something volunteers writing software solves for more than 6 months.

You see that in libreboot and similar projects: coreboot's successful for servers, LB works for 26 laptop models worldwide; rough guess: 10–30 laptops models enter the market, every day

@larsmb @neil I mean, yes, but no.

That whitelabelling has long happened; for example, in the least-cost home DSL router market; it feels like many routers you get from ISPs are just "intern changing the vendor strings and replacing the placeholder logos from the router OEM SDK, which honestly is no SDK but a GPL violation and five ash scripts in a trenchcoat".
Not the kind of devices that someone who hopes to get lasting or repairable hardware would want to use, usually.

And sure, with like

@larsmb @neil androidTV, things are a lot more interchangeable. But the fact it's android highlights the exact same problems you see in the phone market with alternative firmwares:

a somewhat random selection of flagship phones (which often come with by-far-not-the-worst-on-market android distribution to begin with) are supported, at great maintainence cost, and even these often miss features compared to their stock firmware

Then, 0.5a passes, and there's new flagship phones, or new android.

@larsmb @neil generally, the whitelabeling isn't going to make things more centralized. The advantage of just branding a whitelabel product with your company's logo is that economies of scale apply to you, while you have no R&D effort to keep up with the things that will be cheaply available for mass manufacturers in 2 months.

Thus, white label -> larger volume for same hardware -> quicker amortization of R&D cost vs spot component pricing -> higher model turnover is what I think we see in the…