> Tell me about the license for the source of "all the firmware." And keep in mind you found it important enough to reiterate the point about "no closed source" for the kernel drivers.

There isn't anything remotely misleading about the correction that kernel drivers are not in the same situation as most firmware in that they're entirely open source. Every ARM SoC is a proprietary SoC with proprietary CPU cores, memory controller, GPU, image processor, radios and all the other massive complexity included in them. There's a ton of firmware involved in that proprietary hardware. It exists whether or not it's updated. Not updating the radio, GPU, etc. firmware doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Whether or not it's open or closed source has little relevance to the need for it to be hardened, properly isolated and updated. Open or closed source does not directly provide any privacy or security properties. Other components outside the SoC are almost always closed source too. We don't think the fact that the Pixel 6 has a TEE OS based on the open source Trusty TEE or a RISC-V secure element based on OpenTitan makes it inherently more secure than Qualcomm's offerings. Pixel 6 having a Samsung cellular radio and Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth radio as 2 separate chips from the SoC instead of being part of the SoC has not made those more isolated or more open, and if anything we consider moving away from the Qualcomm radios to be a security regression with how well Qualcomm hardens them, although the overall improvements make up for it. If we made a device, it would have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and we'd be quite happy with having the most secure radios, hardware memory tagging support and Qualcomm's great security work elsewhere. Would it be nice if we could have more control and insight? Sure. If a theoretical currently non-existent open source RISC-V smartphone SoC existed and it had comparable privacy/security (which would be very difficult), we'd be very interested. It would take massive work beyond simply having a viable SoC in the performance class with the necessary functionality to make anything remotely competitive on a security level.

GrapheneOS is a non-profit open source project and doesn't produce or sell hardware products. We don't do consulting, exclusive deals with companies or anything like that. There is no intention to ever sell any products, but rather we research hardware, report issues upstream and choose the best available hardware as the officially supported targets. We also intend to work with hardware partners on equal footing with nothing exclusive to help them produce better devices, which will benefit them and will benefit us through having more and better devices to support. We could potentially get more reliable donation revenue through devices with GrapheneOS installed, but that's in no way any kind of requirement for us to work with vendors. We have little to no interest in ever selling devices ourselves. We're fine with the fact that over a dozen companies sell devices with GrapheneOS installed mostly without giving anything back to us. Only a couple give us any form of donations/support. This is not a business.

The claim that there are closed source kernel drivers is untrue for most mainstream Android devices and is a misunderstanding of why devices stick to a specific LTS kernel branch. Those branches receive 6 years of support now because of the model that's used for mainstream embedded / mobile devices. They don't want to port their drivers to newer versions and spend a year getting it working robustly again. It would be entirely possible to do it and it's possible it will happen for Tensor but it can be an overall bad thing for security instead of a good one due to all the added attack surface. A great example is how a bunch of recent vulnerabilities such as 'Dirty Pipe' only impacted the Pixel 6 due to it using the 5.10 LTS branch which was the newest at the time. A Qualcomm device wouldn't have been impacted due to having an older kernel branch.