>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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.