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Purism forums are still down, based on this I'm beginning to think that this might be intentional to shut down more unhappy customers. This is such a shame, my
by 4oo4 3y ago
Purism forums are still down, based on this I'm beginning to think that this might be intentional to shut down more unhappy customers.
This is such a shame, my main device for years has been a Librem 15 and overall I had been really happy with it. Although it is overpriced compared based on specs, I thought it was worth it to have a user-friendly version of Heads firmware (PureBoot) that someone flashed for me. I don't need that level of security but it's awesome to have open source firmware that's Linux based.
Louis nails it when he calls out that they see themselves as always being the good guy as being particularly insidious. Purism had good intentions with what they were developing and were very ambitious with what they were trying to do, and because of that I too had always wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. At this point I'm really glad I never bought a Librem mini or Librem 5 like I was wanting to before, I had stopped following the company a while ago but I knew something was up with their shady "investment opportunity" emails that appear to violate securities laws and may or may not be a ponzi scheme.
Seriously, you tried really hard to do something really ambitious and awesome and have failed your customers, it's way past time to come clean. It's laughable to be organized as a Social Purpose Corporation but defraud and lie to your customers.
If you work at Purism and you see shady and unethical things going on as part of this, don't be afraid to be a whistleblower.
- amosbatto 3y agoPurism suffered a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on July 29, 2023, which took down their site, as they explained on their Matrix channel and forum (when the site came back online). See: https://forums.puri.sm/t/sites-down-no-comms/21000/3 https://forums.puri.sm/t/sites-down-no-comms/21000/3 It is likely that someone who owns a botnet saw Rossmann's criticism of Purism and decided to that the company deserved to be attacked, which is a really rotten thing to do, because then people assume that Purism is hiding something. I agree that Purism should have refunded the cancelled orders, but calling the company a "scam" is way over the top, considering the huge amount of dev work that Purism has done on mobile Linux and the Phosh interface. I own both the Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA and the company is definitely not a "scam".
- 4oo4 3y agoI did see that on the forums, I guess some more transparency on that would have been helpful, since it seems they only told people well after the fact. At the very least not responding to customers is very bad for business, I'm not sure on what basis that Rossman is considering them a scam, but my basis is this, the (possibly illegal under US securities laws) "Investment Opportunity" they've been bugging people about: https://gabrielsieben.tech/2023/05/10/sorry-purism-im-not-investing-its-not-even-legal/ https://gabrielsieben.tech/2023/05/10/sorry-purism-im-not-in... I am a happy owner of a Librem laptop and very much want them to succeed as a company despite all this (assuming that they can get new leadership), but that can't happen if they can't simply be honest with their customers. They're doing something extremely ambitious so it's OK if there are setbacks but they need to be transparent about that. They need to be honest about the setbacks in getting the Librem 5 shipped for people that have been waiting literally years for a phone, and not change refund policies after the fact without clearly communicating it. Trying to silence critics via toxic positivity also isn't helping. In the investment email, they say that they expect to ship both a Librem 11 tablet and Librem 16 laptop sometime this year, that also seems naively optimistic at best and extremely dishonest at worst. As much as I'd love that to happen and would even consider buying a Librem 11 in spite of everything, if they're struggling this badly to ship a phone they've been working on for years, I don't know how they expect people to believe that they can ship two completely new products in that amount of time.