This wasn't completely clear to me from the get-go, but this organization and it's boards are an effort put forward by the Linaro organization. That, to me, makes the product much more relevant and reliable. I wouldn't buy a board from a random startup with no track records of providing support and updates for their devices.
Linaro is an engineering non-profit, support by many of the major players, to improve support for the ARM ecosystem. This includes improvements to GCC, LLVM, the Linux kernel, various libc's, AOSP, ...
They also provide Ubuntu, Debian and Android RFS images for supported reference boards.
I understand that they went with a Mali GPU, since it is the reference GPU design from ARM. However, it is unfortunate that there is no open source driver for this platform. Maybe this will change in the future.
Exactly - the open source kernel driver is just a gateway for the user space driver to access the hardware. The real magic is in the closed source, user space driver.
I believe Linus has stopped accepting these kinds of Trojan horse drivers into the mainline kernel, unless an open source user space component that does at least handle 2D graphics through it is also available.
Linaro is an engineering non-profit, support by many of the major players, to improve support for the ARM ecosystem. This includes improvements to GCC, LLVM, the Linux kernel, various libc's, AOSP, ... They also provide Ubuntu, Debian and Android RFS images for supported reference boards.
I understand that they went with a Mali GPU, since it is the reference GPU design from ARM. However, it is unfortunate that there is no open source driver for this platform. Maybe this will change in the future.