Well, when 1000+ hackers have domain expertise you typically end up with at least a handful of projects containing working code. That's even if the code itself

Well, when 1000+ hackers have domain expertise you typically end up with at least a handful of projects containing working code. That's even if the code itself lives in a legally grey area. (Remember the various Popcorn Time forks?) So I don't think legality is the fundamental issue. Rather, I think it's that there are probably only 2 people with the domain expertise necessary to lead a successful reverse-engineering project of this particular chip. As a general response to the grandparent: I think the reason we don't have an affordable, fully-free modern laptop is because it requires many components for which the free software world only has a handful of domain experts. In other words, such a laptop is in the category of problems for which hackers tend to vastly overestimate their potential resources. (I think secure messaging applications also fall into this same category.)