Swinging back to open standards
puri.sm
puri.sm
Folks should be wary about ordering from Purism until/unless Purism shows clear signs in the future that it will give timely refunds to customers who do not want to continue waiting for the Librem 5 device they ordered years ago. (For the purposes of this post, let's assign the value of timely to be no more than 30 business days from the original request for a refund.)
Worse, Purism continually sets new deadlines which they continue to fail to meet.
As it stands, there are lots of reports of Purism telling the customer that they may only receive a refund when Purism claims that particular device is ready to ship to that customer. This is against their original terms of service and AFAICT isn't legal in the U.S.
Many users have contacted their state's attorney general to complain about this business practice. I'm confident I can simply link to the purism subreddit and readers here will instantly find relevant reports about the difficulty of receiving a refund:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/
To be clear-- my complaint isn't about Purism not being able to ship Librem 5 on time. My complaint is about their unethical practice of withholding refunds from customers who clearly and reasonably request one after patiently waiting to receive their devices.
In fact, a number of the complaints on that subreddit were posted only after the customer claimed they had been emailing Purism for over a year to obtain a refund for the device they ordered but never received.
Edit: clarification with the word "timely" added, a definition of "timely" provided, and a few other stray clarifications to be maximally generous.
Disclosure: I work for Purism as a software dev.
First you guys said it was because I had to wait until my batch was going to ship. I waited. Now no who knows and no one will talk to me beyond saying "maybe soon?" and throwing their arms up. I'm a FOSS advocate and loved the idea of the Librem and even the idea of paying more for an ethical device, but this all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth and I'm not alone.
Any info would be appreciated. The email volleyball doesn't ever yield any new information month to month to month...
I’m sure it didn’t start that way, But as time goes on an on it’s harer to say it’s false.
When deadlines got missed the third or fourth time I got worried. Then Purism started releasing a few phones to influencers and internal people only and claimed "shipping" I got more worried. I think the only "real" shipping batch was Evergreen ultimately anyway, but when some a few normal customers began explaining they got phones and they were overheating I got more worried. More time passed and the prices started rising to insane levels, transparency had fallen away completely and I still hadn't received my phone I just decided to cut bait. I asked for a refund and was told I would have to wait so wait I did.
> the crowdfunder preorders were never supposed to be refundable
Purism's crowdfunding wasn't traditional crowdfunding. The company exists with other, supposedly profitable, lines. The crowdfunders were supposed to get their devices before Purism started promising Librem USA to new customers. If you have a backlog, you clear the backlog before accepting, promising and shipping new devices to new customers. You don't just sit on the money and hand out IOUs.
Here[0] is the policy in 2020 regarding the crowdfunding campaign refunds.
> If you want to cancel an order for products that are in the process of crowdfunding or pre-order, we will issue a full refund once the crowdfunding/pre-order of the product is completed and all pre-orders are shipped.
This is now missing from Purism's policies. That's after I was told I would have to wait for my line in the queue. You're telling me the backlog up to 2019 is clear so I assume all "pre-orders" are shipped and I'm still handed promises. Since the queue is something mythical and no one, even Purism themselves, can tell me where I am in it, I'm left holding the bag. This is not how you run an "ethical company".
tldr; It's almost 2023 and I do not have either the phone I ordered in 2017 or the refund I filed for years later after a litany of missed deadlines, promises and communications failures.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20201127113603/https://puri.sm/p...
> If you want to cancel an order for products that are in the process of crowdfunding or pre-order, we will issue a full refund once the crowdfunding/pre-order of the product is completed and all pre-orders are shipped.
Librem 5 pre-orders quite obviously aren't all shipped yet, otherwise you would be able to buy one without waiting in queue and all people who pre-ordered in 2019 or later would already have received their phone.
If so, this contradicts what I've been told in emails by Purism staff, the fact that people after me in the queue have received refunds and the fact that this policy in question no longer even exists on their website. It's all super transparent, fair and customer friendly.
In any case, I guess I'll send another email because I think you're right, I should already have gotten a refund. Maybe Purism will agree with us time around. Saying my experience is anomalous doesn't really square with community sentiment. My situation isn't some crazy one-off and I think today Purism is more well known for their shady customer service practices than their open hardware and software. Hang around any of the forums and you'll see more disillusioned Purism fans than happy customers. I certainly didn't pre-order a Linux phone so I could be stuck in customer service limbo five years later divorced from both cash and computer.
Hell, I'd even take a phone if I could get one before they push back deliveries another year or two but I think that may push me into a different queue.
1. there was a crowdfunder in 2017
2. after the crowdfunder ended in 2017, Purism made the Librem 5 available to purchase on their website. The ability to buy it as a product goes back to at least mid-2019 (and probably well before)
3. At some point in the last few months, Purism put a lead time on the Librem 5 of 52 weeks
For the period covering #2 and #3 above, Purism was (and is!) selling a device to customers over their web site. It's still up here:
https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
The complaints I've read on the subreddit are from people who bought the Librem 5 as product offered on Purism's website, well after the crowdfunder was over.
(However, for the edge case of the OP you're responding to I do hope Purism will issue that refund-- as seba_dos1 said above the shipping queue is now into 2019, well past when that customer ordered. So unless the customer received their phone, there should be no reason not to issue that refund if waiting for the shipping date is indeed the only caveat.)
Additionally, there are apparently outstanding complaints about customers unable to get refunds for other Purism products, like their Librem 14 laptop:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/xejf32/refund_on_th...
AFAICT that product was never crowdfunded.
Again-- until these problems are officially addressed by Purism with clear evidence trickling down to the customers who want refunds, buyer beware.
Edit: clarifications
Available to pre-order a product that was still in development, with all the risks it brings.
> 3. At some point in the last few months, Purism put a lead time on the Librem 5 of 52 weeks
Such long lead times have been put there much earlier than "in the last few months". Today the expected lead time is actually shorter than that, but given the Purism's history of too optimistic time estimates I doubt that it's going to be changed again to anything else than "10 work days" at the day the production and shipping catch up with all existing pre-orders.
I'd be careful with random complaints on Reddit made by deleted users, there have been some organized FUD campaigns there in the past (and it's worth noting that "Purism" subreddit is not controlled by Purism in any way and has never been used for any kind of official communication).
You're not saying that all of the phones are manufactured, and the only problem is getting them to the post office. That would be "built yet." What's being done is fairly common, but what it also means is that the crowdfunding has never stopped. People are commissioning phones to be manufactured, not buying phones. There's no advantage in talking around that except to make it look suspicious.
"Shipping slower" is using "shipping" as a euphemism for "being built."
I've lost all faith in purism as a company.
Yes, there are a lot of proprietary players today. Particularly all mobile platforms, and some gatekeepers like search and attention claiming groups in social media. But the web still dominates as the primary platform, and it remains quite available to everyone.
We don't have to "swing back", it's already here in front of us. We could utilize it better, and reject some of the platforms holding us back. But that's up to each individual.
Open internet standards aren't just about the web.
I should remind you that your application and their application will share your messages but may have very different privacy policies.
(Some problems will persist and still require further assessment and decision and possibly division.)
Alice sends message "Hi" to Bob through app Alpha; it is encrypted during transmission; Bob receives it on his app named Beta - but Beta manages the message in fully readable form, "'H'-'i'", and does what its coders want with it.
There is no shortage of open protocols that you can use to communicate with all your friends. I don't see that you should be able to compel application vendors, that all build on top of open protocols into any interop they don't want.
[1] Emacs is, after all, an operating system with ambitions of being a text editor.
1. Run Windows 95 in an emulator, maybe a webassembly one.
2. Generate the mouse clicks and keyboard events to run that program, probably in a full screen DOS window. It must be in the %PATH%
3. In the same way type in the buffer in the input of the program.
4. OCR the output.
5. Replace the content of the buffer.
I think it is feasible.
Step 1 is for example https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95
I wouldn't be surprised that steps 2 to 4 are already implemented in some form.
Step 5 should be trivial.
That's a different axis.
Solutions need to be open (interoperable) standards. That means I must have the ability to sit down and implement all of it myself and it'll interoperate with everyone else.
Whether you pay or not is separate consideration. If I implement everything myself I pay nothing other than a lot of my time. Alternatively I can pay someone else to implement it for me, or buy a pre-built solution from any number of vendors, or subscribe to a SaaS solution from other vendors.
The key is interoperability between all these. Like HTTP or SMTP.
Protocols that allow any* vendor to build a device that talks with other devices instead of demanding that you can only talk to a single brand.
Not all bridges can do this though, its true. Still almost universally a better UX than having 10 messaging apps.
I'm with you, but my friends and family are all on Instagram and Discord, even if they're using the browser version of those apps. There's a lot of interest in Mastadon since Musks' Twitter antics. I hope it takes off, along with Matrix, but the network effects are really powerful.
It's nice to see all the development going into WebAssembly as it promises independence from proprietary desktop OS's. It also allows proprietary applications that are even more locked into a vendor's subscription model than traditional desktop software. So yeah, more web is great, but we can't assume that the web and open standards are the same thing.
What in the world does that have to do with open standards? This is just Panglossian guilt-tripping about people who dare suggest that something about the status quo be improved; Dr. Pinker swooping in to berate us about this being the best of all possible worlds.
edit: anyway, why talk about how open the web is when we can talk about how open x86 architecture is, or how available textbooks about how electricity works are? How can you complain about open standards when everyone has electricity piped to their home that they can do anything they want with? The fairest of farities, the most opportune of opportunities...
Most SaaS will go out of business. Dev cycles will shift proportionally to working more on enterprise systems and the open standards that support them.
People are not wanting to roll their own cloud, or index their own logs. They want to chew on other problems.
Companies fail. All too often that proprietary 'thing' they had becomes non-supported and you have to just throw away everything you have connected with that 'thing' such as files written in formats that nothing can access, or hardware that there are no supplies for, etc, etc.
When was the last time that you were able to buy a 16-hard-sectored 8-inch floppy? When were you last able to access that Wang-written word-processing file? Can you even buy a fresh video-tape for a Betamax video recorder?
If you stick to open hardware and open software formats, you can still find them useful even decades after their makers have turned to dust.
Deploying software to mobile devices should be the same as desktop computing.
Apple and Google argue their stance is for user privacy and security, but they can still maintain a central catalog of malware and remove bad apps by signature. Permissions flags and controls can work without a store. Apps can be required to report their provenance, which opens up means for manual or automated review.
Google technically allows apk downloads, but they're "scary" and most users don't know how to perform them. This is as good as disallowing open installs outright.
Google and Apple won't ever do this unless the DOJ tells them they must.
I would argue that an antitrust action against these two app stores is essential to remove an undue tax on innovation and to strengthen the market for competition. It's not like money cannot be made on devices and services and that neither company doesn't already have the upper leg on these fronts as well.
No matter what happens, this will continue to be true for some percentage of users because they've come to associate downloading software from random sites with things like malware and adware, and not without reason; while there are perfectly legitimate software packages that can't be distributed on the Play Store for one reason or another, by far and away the most common reason for APKs not being on the Play Store or users sideloading is because the app in question is doing something shady or the user is pirating apps from dubious sources that turn the apps in question into trojans.
Even in the desktop world there's some level of trepidation with downloading from websites, particularly on Windows where search results are littered with things like shady SEO-optimized download sites, and that problem pre-dates all modern app stores.
The question is how to solve that. I don't think the answer is to give up and say it's unsolvable and just has to be lived with, especially since doing so isn't going to engender support from those who cling to app stores for safety purposes.
When the orders of magnitude change, so too do the solutions.
We already know how much trouble the general public has experienced managing desktop computing. We even have app stores for that now. Market penetration for phones is even bigger, is a more uniform distribution by age group, and has many fewer options for troubleshooting if something goes wrong.
Running homebrew on your phone is not the same as running it on your PC (and I avoid doing even that, because I care about configuration capture)
It is the same: open your web browser.
I really hope the government doesn't get involved. Because I desire the reverse. Software companies should stop making apps and just provide a better web experience. If consumers stopped installing apps, then software vendors would invest in open standards.