The problem is, making hardware is hard. Screw something up, in the best case you can fix it in ucode, if you're not that lucky you can get away with a new stepping, but in the worst case you have to do a recall and not just deal with your own wasted effort, but also the wasted downstream efforts and rework costs.

So a lot of the complexity of what the hardware is doing gets relegated to firmware as that is easier to patch and, especially relevant for wifi hardware before the specs get finalized, extend/adapt later on.

The problem with that, in turn, is patents and trade secrets. What used to be hideable in the ASIC masks now is computer code that's more or less trivially disassemblable or to reverse engineer (see e.g. nouveau for older NVDA cards and Alyssa's work on Apple), and if you want true FOSS support, you sometimes can't fulfill other requirements at the same time (see the drama surrounding HDMI2/HDCP support for AMD on Linux).

And for anything RF you get the FCC that's going to throw rocks around on top of that. Since a few years, the unique combination of RF devices (wifi, bt, 4G/5G), antenna and OS side driver has to be certified. That's why you get Lenovo devices refusing to boot when you have a non-Lenovo USB network adapter attached at boot time or when you swap the Sierra Wireless modem with an identical modem from a Dell (that only has a different VID/PID), or why you need old, long outdated Lenovo/Dell/HP/... drivers for RF devices and the "official" manufacturer ones will not work without patching.

I would love a world in which everyone in the ecosystem were forced to provide interface documentation, datasheets, errata and ucode/firmware blobs with source for all their devices, but unfortunately, DRM, anti-cheat, anti-fraud and overeager RF regulatory authorities have a lot of influence over lawmakers, way more than FOSS advocates.

Linux already maintains quirks code paths for all kinds of devices where the manufacturer "could have" updated the firmware to fix the bug but never did.

It also contains quirks for Intel x86 core platform features: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/kerne...

For the now-fashionable LLMs-on-GPUs world, it's pretty much just matrix multiplications. How many patents can reside in that? I don't expect Google to sell TPUs because that's not the business they're in, but AMD could put them in their SoCs without writing drivers: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture-tpu-vm...