As a software developer myself, i would like to move this conversation from a simple wish or desire to see open source firmware, to something with a bit more meat on its bone. For us as a community, as well as for Polyend.
There are a couple things to consider i think:
- We as a community should never have the expectation that a company is willing to opensource their intellectual property. This is infact a massive privilege, when it does happen.
- To open source always comes at a cost as well. Maintaining and organizing such a venture always has a price. Timewise (and/or monetary) for everyone involved.
- It also opens up other manufacturers to just take your code and build their own hardware around it, which can be a risk you expose yourself to.
- Riskmanagement for bricked hardware in case an open source firmware somewhow destroys devices.
- And/or defining rules and agreements so that users who are willing to use 3rd party firmwares on their hardware know that they are voiding their warranty in case something goes sideways.
With this in mind, i wouldn’t blame any company to not be willing to expose themselfs to this.
Having said all that - i think there are a couple valid strategies that can be put into place, that would still allow for community contributions - if a company is willing and can spare time and effort towards this.
- Vetting developers that you grant code access and putting them under an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement)
- Setting rules that only compiled firmwares are allowed to be released to the public / community
- I’m sure there are other strategies that i didn’t think of (but this post is already freaking long)
I also believe it would be very important to quantify how many actual developers would be interested or willing to work on community firmwares. It’s easy to wish for it, but you also need people willing to actually contribute. So let’s have a little poll, shall we? 
Let’s see where our community falls under.
This poll is anonymous. If you are a developer please specifiy which ecosystem you are interested in and your preference regarding programming language (you can select more than one):
- I would love to develop for the Play Ecosystem
- I would love to develop for the Tracker Ecosystem
- I’m a developer and i don’t care which programming language i have to use
- I’m a developer but it depends on the language required
- I’m not a developer but want to help test community firmwares
- I’d just love to see open source software
- I just want to make music and don’t really care about all of this
I invite you all to share this post with possibly interested parties, the more votes and opinions we can gather, the clearer the picture will become.
And i’m looking forward to any further discussion surrounding this topic. 