I would really like to buy or build some sort of smartphone that only uses open source hardware. But I hear a lot of people saying that all the mobile connectivity hardware is closed source and for some reason it is almost impossible to design your own baseband chip to be compatible with all the common technologies. I read something about Openmoko which doesn't seem to exist anymore, but they basically created open source phones, but I want a sort of smartphone and having no EDGE or LTE really is a bummer.
Can anyone enlighten me on the topic of why it is so hard to get an open source chip for a technology which from all I learned is completely free and open source?
This is about as "open source" as I know off the top of my head. Check out the tutorial link.
IIRC many cellular technologies are covered by a truckload of patents, which might be the reason why there's less info on them. I've never really looked though.
I just found a pretty interesting post on the open source GSM stack of Osmocom which has been posted on their website last week: http://planet.openmoko.org/
So they are making progress. But I think Openmoko dead.