Ethics

From my point of view, this is not in a conflict. Fairphone without drivers and other code in upstream projects like kernel, mesa, ... can't really fully deliver on it's ethical promise, at least with respect to it's livespan. What use would such phone be for me when there is no software to run on it after few years? Moreover without all the code upstream, the choice is already limited from the start. And for this reason I really agree with you that it would be great if they join forces ...

I still have my 11 year old laptop as a backup and I'm running latest Fedora on it without much problems. If I really wanted, I could have installed ArchLinux instead and compile the latest vanilla kernel on it and it would work just fine, because the drivers are a free sofware maintained upstream. But with smartphones and theirs proprietary drivers, I can't even select Android distribution and keep it updated.