[Fascinate General] ivorycruncher:
Um, wow, what have you been reading? First off, our phone came with 2.1, not 1.6, so I'm not sure where you got that number from.

Secondly, the reason that we (not Samsung) could not build a ROM not based on the stock OEM ROM was because the source code for the RIL that Samsung provided for the Fascinate was bad code, which made it extremely difficult to create a working RIL what will work with a custom OS. However, jt1134 and punk.kaos were able to reverse engineer the bad code into working code, in order to proceed with ROM building.

This has nothing to do with Samsung themselves though. Samsung built the RIL to begin with, so they most certainly can (and have) created RIL code that works with Froyo, quite a long time ago in fact. They released the Galaxy S line with Eclair because that was likely the newest version available when they began developing the OS for those phones. In order to convert the OS to Froyo to launch it on the phone, they would have had to significantly delay the launch, which was not an option. This is likely why so many phones are released with outdated versions of Android. And I would like to point out that if they just put Google's code on there and didn't insist in polluting it with their own proprietary junk, it wouldn't take so long to release in the first place, and wouldn't be so difficult to upgrade later.

Getting back on topic, I figured that the problem with getting these updates really all comes down to money. People have always had to pay for OS upgrades for PCs, but due to Android and iOS, have now come to expect to receive these updates for free. The problem is, somebody has to develop an upgrade process, and test the heck out of it, and those developers have to get paid. So the OEM pays them, and then naturally tries to pass the cost along to the carrier, because they don't want to work for free. The carrier also doesn't want to pay for the upgrade, but also knows they can't get away with charging their customers for it without significant backlash, so they basically just sit there and hope the problem eventually goes away, or that the OEM will finally back down and release the update for free, which is what's been described as our current situation.

If this is really such a big problem, they could be taking steps to not end up in this situation, such as figuring the cost of these upgrades into the price of the phones and/or rate plans. However, the carriers also have added incentive to not push for the upgrades, because that effectively extends the life of the handset, and they want you to keep buying new hardware all the time, since they make money from selling hardware, and lose money on the free upgrades.

In the end, it's all about money. Thankfully we have such a great community of developers here on XDA that are willing to go the extra mile to not only get us our upgrades, but also add cool features and boost the performance way beyond what the manufacturer gave us. Thanks to that, our hardware's lifetime is determined not by when a carrier or OEM pulls support, but rather by when the devices physically die or break, or the hardware becomes too outdated for the tasks we wish to perform. And this way, through donations, we can pay our developers for good upgrades, not our carrier for crappy, bloated ones.