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Comment by telendram | Hacker News Reader

Why does it sound so much like a scam ?

Before anyone considers putting money there, they should read this interview by their former CTO. Sounds like a train wreck to me:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...

Reading that, I wonder whether a start up would have a better time offering OS/firmware support for already shipping, mass produced devices. i.e. Buy the latest XPS 15 and get to work making an installer that disables all the things they want to disable (intel ME off the top of mind). Doing similar with phone models, etc. I wonder whether this could be done for Windows drivers, for that matter.

Tuxedo Computers does this.

That’s what Purism does already, they are selling bog standard OEM laptops and now “NUCs” with Coreboot at a pretty high premium.

Unlike System76 they aren’t even maintaining a swanky Linux distro like PopOS.

Um, they are maintaining a distro. It’s called PureOS [0].

[0]: https://www.pureos.net

Just to clarify, it’s possible to focus solely on providing drivers for known hardware configurations and across a variety of OSes. Deciding to fork Debian and maintaining a distribution on top of those drivers seems massively unnecessary.

This is very outdated, with predictions not turned out to be correct. For instance, the most freedom-respecting smartphone on the market has been built.

Not sure about the scam, but my bayesian bullshit filter is triggered by the "unlike all the evil for-profit corporations, we're a white'n'fluffy company aiming for the greater good".

They have proven this by numerous contributions to FLOSS [0], releasing laptops with kill switches [1] and neutralized Intel ME [2], FSF-approved OS [3], FSF-endorsed phone [4] and so on.

[0] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-and-linux-5-13/

[1] https://puri.sm/security/

[2] https://puri.sm/projects/coreboot/

[3] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed...

[4] https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/

Well, in this case good for them and shame on my bayesian filter.

I wish I were an "accredited investor according to Rule 501 under the Securities Act of 1933", because from your links it looks like a kind of good I'd be willing to invest in.

So what? You're investing to make money. For those purposes, it's much better for you if they are actually as bad or worse than any other company. Nobody makes big money actually respecting the principles they claim

If Purism was a scam VCs would be begging to invest. They're not evil enough to scam anyone (on purpose at least).

Because when you start digging behind the marketing at Purism a lot of what they say and do are often two different things.

Any particular examples?

Given I've had a number of non-spammy emails from them wind up in gmail's spam that I've had to mark as not so, I was surprised when I got an email about this several days ago and it wasn't marked spam. I was really tempted to mark it as such...

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