I was reading recently about the struggles of Fairphone to open up their hardware so that other operating systems could be installed - Sailfish, Ubuntu, Firefox

I was reading recently about the struggles of Fairphone to open up their hardware so that other operating systems could be installed - Sailfish, Ubuntu, Firefox etc. The impression which emerged was that the people placing hardware orders had really quite limited power to affect this kind of behaviour, unless they are a really large player. What do you think Ubuntu can do?