Exactly, having the hardware work is one thing. But to support a phone you need to fix security issues. So every binary blob is a ticking time bomb that is just

Exactly, having the hardware work is one thing. But to support a phone you need to fix security issues. So every binary blob is a ticking time bomb that is just waiting for a security vulnerability to be found either in it, or that needs a firmware patch to solve or workaround. So either you need the source so that you can support it yourself, or you need a contract with Qualcomm to release security patches. Sure, a stable ABI may mean that it would be cheaper for Qualcomm to release version updates as well, but at this point I would be happy if I could get security updates for more than 3 years. We can start asking for feature updates next.