It could work if the hardware vendor released all the platform-specific code as open source. Then a community could potentially keep that code up to date well e

It could work if the hardware vendor released all the platform-specific code as open source. Then a community could potentially keep that code up to date well enough to interface with more rapidly changing layers on top of it. Of course, it is more work than if the hardware is standardized. But it might be doable if you don't have to reverse-engineer things.