Legal situation

[viva astoria]

Hello,

I am trying to find some information about the situation with available GSM chips with open firmware. And I found on a (apparently abandoned) page of one of such open firmware projects the following information. It says that

"Openmoko <...> shipped their phones with an official baseband firmware version that was just as proprietary as any other, they did so only because of legal restrictions"

(quoted page: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/free-software-cellular-baseband )

Do you know what these legal restrictions were? And will freecalypso be able to overcome them? How?