This would be my expectation too. Though I’d think you’d need to go one further - hardware manuals AND a license to redistribute any necessary firmware binaries

This would be my expectation too. Though I’d think you’d need to go one further - hardware manuals AND a license to redistribute any necessary firmware binaries - the latter has been an issue with Nouveau for example. In fact I think manuals are probably better in a lot of cases, OEM drivers are routinely terrible.