These people come from the Sony Ericsson joint venture. Technically speaking, they weren't part of Sony until February of last year, when Sony bought out Ericss

These people come from the Sony Ericsson joint venture. Technically speaking, they weren't part of Sony until February of last year, when Sony bought out Ericsson's stake in the joint venture. Sony Ericsson had a reasonably good relationship with the developer community pre-acquisition (they've been called out by JBQ as a good AOSP citizen and, IIRC, had official boot loader unlocks for retail phones before HTC). At the time, I remember wondering if being acquired by Sony proper would start to move that in the wrong direction, but, if anything, they've gotten better: they open-sourced their sensor HAL, they have official AOSP projects for several devices (including the Xperia S which was the first attempt at a non-Nexus AOSP phone) and now trying to open the SmartWatch. You can feel free to judge these people for the actions of a different department of a company they weren't even part of at the time. I prefer to consider things case-by-case.