If we wanted secure products, we wouldn't ban devices. We'd mandate they open their firmware to audits.

It'd be great if open firmware could be commercially viable. Finding a business model is hard.

The OpenWRT One [1] sponsored by the Software Conservancy [2] and manufactured by Banana Pi [3] works lovely.

[1] https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one

[2] https://sfconservancy.org/activities/openwrt-one.html

[3] https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/OpenWRT-One/BananaPi_OpenWRT-O...

[OpenWrt Wiki] OpenWrt One

Open firmware would become commercially viable when IP is abolished
How do you see firmware becoming more open without copyright exactly?
Not prosecuting people trying to reverse engineer any kind of software would be a great start...

I'm no fan of imaginary property, but you're going to have to lay out your reasoning here. Firmware security is such crap precisely because most hardware manufacturers see it as nothing but a cost center they wish they could avoid.

The difficulty of installing OpenWRT or Linux in general on hardware comes from that hardware not being documented, or having straightforward APIs like BIOS/EFI.

Or for some devices, community distributions that dubiously remix manufacturer-supplied binaries are available. But we generally see that as soon as the manufacturer stops their updates, the community versions start lagging behind as well.