That's the thesis behind a piece by Sascha Segan over at PC Magazine, where he blames a good deal of the lack of geek-friendly Linux handsets on the wireless carriers themselves. But how much of it is also end-user indifference?

From the article:

I had made a similar observation a while back, when the open-source OpenMoko phone was still new and there seemed like a chance it would turn into the Next Big Tinkerer's Thing. But nothing happened.

Why nothing happened was twofold. One, the carriers resist anything tinkerer-friendly for all the reasons cited in the Segan article: they don't like anything they can't control, because anything they can't control can't be metered, and anything they can't meter can't have its pricing gauged to within an inch of its life. ("They didn't expect how much iPhone users would surf the Web, and look where that's gotten them," Segan points out.)

Two, there have been a lot of dead-wrong guesses about how much freedom people want with their handsets and carriers -- or, rather, what kind. The OpenMoko variety of freedom was too far off the map for most people. The iPhone, like the Mac itself, may be a walled garden, but the sheer amount of things to do within that walled garden more than make up for its insularity. (I propose an experiment. Put two people in a room, one who's jail-broken their iPhone and one who hasn't. Get them talking about the whole thing. See who tries to convince whom of what, and why, and how far they get. Take notes.)

The exception, the median between extremes, seems to be embodied in Android -- and while it hasn't broken through and achieved iPhone-like popularity, it's also still relatively new. The few folks I know who have opted for 'Droid phones love them, and what I've seen of it myself has been very compelling. When I've asked them what it is about 'Droid they like so much, they reply with something along the lines of "It's like the iPhone, but I don't have to pay the ridiculous amount of money Apple wants, or use a carrier I hate." Even when Apple loses, they still win by being a point of reference.

But again, through all of this, the carriers have always been the biggest obstacle. As Morpheus said in The Matrix, they are the gatekeepers. He was referring to the Agents, and while I doubt the carriers are that openly malevolent, they aren't going to abandon their post anytime soon.

Two things might change their position: