This amounts to saying that all Linux hardware companies should also be (userland) software companies. I completely disagree with that.
Let Linux hardware companies do two things and do them well:
- tamper-evidently source, assemble and ship hardware that is compatible with Linux without requiring proprietary firmware, and that has hardware features to improve privacy (e.g. effective killswitches; sane chip choices; sane logical separation between chips at the PCB level);
- tamper-evidently source, assemble and ship privacy and security-orientated libre firmware to support their hardware (e.g. the way that Purism is working on Heads), and updates to this firmware.
This is sorely needed, and will, itself, help to advance the state of the upper layers in the stack. Why? Because it will enable more people to learn about and to obtain hardware that supports the privacy protections in those upper layers meaningfully. Contrast this with what happens currently: most people - due to lack of availability, lack of affordability, and lack of awareness about security, privacy, and libre hardware - run hardware that undermines those upper layer protections by requiring untrustworthy binaries, by lacking killswitches, and/or by giving modems direct access to RAM or suchlike.
I think you meant to say, “supporting” 