Sony Mobile has just announced that it welcomes the project and will “support it with resources and contributions”. To this end, the company has published the binaries (e.g. hardware drivers) necessary for the Xperia S project to continue. In addition, one of Sony Mobile’s top engineers, Björn Andersson, will actively participate in the project and will “help review and contribute patches to this project.”
With Sony’s help the project will now get to the stage where the Xperia S will boot and reach the home screen running the project code. However, we need to make it clear that a lot of work will be needed to reach the goal of vanilla Android and people should be patient about the efforts that Google, Sony and other developers make in trying to make this become a reality.