The business plans of Nokia, OpenMoko, Firefox and Ubuntu all depended on selling millions of phones. Built on the ashes of those efforts, Purism appears to have a viable business plan making good profits selling many thousands.
It's the best mobile platform I've ever tried. After all, it was just a tweaked Debian distro.
It's exciting to see Purism might head the pure Linux stack way, not just a de-Googled Android route. I also wish Jolla eventually open sources Sailfish, or gets bought by someone who does this.
OpenMoko - not really, it was major mismanagement in other areas (and some poor luck) that killed it, but AFAIR production volume was actually being predicted quite well.
Firefox OS, Ubuntu Edge - sure.
They should have iterated on this with every flagship phone and push it to the cheaper phones as well.
I was so sad and angry when this never came together. They just spiraled out of control after that.