> Many of the older phones can be rooted and custom roms installed
"Rooting" is exploiting security holes, which is illegal under the DMCA in the United States and under other laws in other jurisdictions. The only reason that is even possible is accidental. The phones are deliberately locked down.
> the problem is nobody is writing drivers for that hardware anymore.
If the Linux kernel had been re-licensed under GPLv3, the source code for the drivers would be available and the drivers would still work. There are a ton of Free Software drivers in Linux and NetBSD/OpenBSD written in the 1990s that have had minimal modifications in the meantime and still run.
"Rooting" is exploiting security holes, which is illegal under the DMCA in the United States and under other laws in other jurisdictions. The only reason that is even possible is accidental. The phones are deliberately locked down.
> the problem is nobody is writing drivers for that hardware anymore.
If the Linux kernel had been re-licensed under GPLv3, the source code for the drivers would be available and the drivers would still work. There are a ton of Free Software drivers in Linux and NetBSD/OpenBSD written in the 1990s that have had minimal modifications in the meantime and still run.