Bunnie Huang (of MIT fame, original cracker of Xbox, proponent of open hardware [see: Chumby, Novena, etc]) has a really interesting talk given at the Media Labs in '15 at his alma mater[1]. It's about 1:15 but fully worth the watch including the QA, if you have any interest in 'open hardware'. That Rockchip run's on a fairly complicated 4core ARM. So which while the instruction set may be open, so is Intels. They'll happily ship to you their 3 volume multi-thousand page ISA. (Open is when you get to see any of final Altium/Cadence files that were used for the tape-out to make production wafers). At best you might get a few block diagrams. Good luck getting anything more than that. The closest you'll get to something open might be collaborative open standards a la the OpenPOWER (still, not that open) or RISC-V (which is probably still fab'ing at what, 65nm? 45?)

Anyways, that Rockchip is far from open. watch the talk to see his rationale behind choosing Freescale as his microprocessor of choice. He remarks on how $2.25 SoC picked up on the streets of Shenzhen have the full capabilities to run on GSM, which is really pretty remarkable. Obviously they're stealing IP and probably using grey-market tech/seconds that failed QA, but when he talks about the innovation _within_ that grey-market its fascinating. Even with his PhD in EE from MIT, experience in taking consumer products to market multiple times, fluency in Mandarin to aide in his ability to navigate the markets of Shenzhen, he'd have a real difficult time making a low-unit production run to compete with half the functionality of a low-level Android at twice the price because of the massive barriers to market. (Starting with easy things like UL certs and proper EMI shielding to more difficult political issues in getting a phone like that through the FCC and to the consumer). There's no economies of scale to help when Johnny doesn't know why he needs OSS.

Tangentially - if the N900 was still around I'd pay retail for it.

[1]http://www.bunniestudios.com/ [2]The reason it's so cheap is because they're clearly not paying any licensing fees to the appropriate IP owners. Every time a phone gets pumped out in a market where companies have litigious recourse, you have compliance with FTDI and pay your taxes to use USB, rent your little carved out spectrum from the FCC, etc.

Are there any non-license encumbered protocols similar to USB? I know DisplayPort is royalty free. How does that even work when you can run USB over Displayport?

I know there is no open band 4G standard, and while WIMAX is close its only advertised for support on restricted radio bands, which is not good enough. But radio spectrum allocation already is an extremely fucked up mess that needs dissolved all on its own.

There's only a license for USB if you want to use the USB trademark, or if you want your own Vendor ID. Pretty much every chip with USB already has paid the money for the Vendor ID because it makes headaches due to collisions, etc, much, much less likely. However, if you need an id, http://pid.codes/ has pids for your use for free. USB over DisplayPort, the company almost certainly has paid for a USB vendor ID, for much the same reason. If you're making a few million chips, the amortized cost of the license becomes less than a penny. Displayport, if you don't want to carry USB, there's no requirement to -- the displayport connectors on my video cards certainly don't carry USB.

Regarding similar protocols, there really isn't anything. One of the lessons from the Bad Old Days is that not having a centralized registry is that you get frustrating conflicts and huge interoperability problems.

With radio spectrum allocation, it's fucked up for a number of reasons, and dissolving it would cause even more problems. Radio astronomy needs clear areas of bandwidth so they can look over the sky and analyze, emergency responders need the same so people can be directed quickly, local broadcasters need it so that people can actually broadcast. Cell phones need them so they can communicate with towers. Radio technology is /complicated/ and at higher frequencies, it only gets moreso. That's why devices need licensing -- if someone screws up the radio hardware/software, it can easily impact more than themselves. Abolishing any sort of spectrum allocation would only lead to a commons that would quickly degrade and send us right back to corded devices.

I just want to point out there is a distinction between allocating spectrum for certain purposes and selling it to private companies. I would never recommend not having a frequency band restricted to emergency communications, though I admit I'm not informed enough about astronomy to know what is optimal there, but I still feel outright saying "you cannot produce radio waves of <these> frequencies, ever" is a very blunt solution.

My larger point is that we have observed in the last twenty years that while signal congestion can be real, we can also now build radios sophisticated enough to deal with it much better than in the past. Things you cannot have interfered with like air traffic control and emergency broadcasts should absolutely be given their own channels, but technology has improved enough that we can certainly stymie their band allocations they are given today without compromising integrity assuming the use of more capable radios.

But even then, I'm not strongly arguing to do any of that - I think it is possible, but I also don't think its particularly necessary - we could simply de-privatize most of the sold off spectrum to private companies to be used for public communications and in the common interest. Think of the Internet bandwidth over air we could get if we had gigahertz of available channels between the 500 to 5000mhz bands.

We need Nokia to buy Jolla and release a N900 successor.

The reason it don't have CPU microcode though is that ARM is a RISC architecture I think.