Purism wants Louis Rossman to Delete video exposing refund scam & delay tactic
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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.
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".
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-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.
Not a native speaker, but to me the email sounds in the utmost way like a snake salesman riding into town.
For sure I'll never buy a Purism phone from such people.
my direct experience w/ purism is pretty minimal, but it's clear there are people who are ticked off at them; just look at this BBB report:
https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/general-merc...
if you assume you're a "bad person" you'll work hard to be seen as being trustworthy
i don't agree with this. if i assume i am a bad person, then to me that means i don't care what others think and it would exactly not motivate me to be better. i have heard this many times, people excusing their bad behavior with saying that they are a bad person and can't or don't want to improve.
when louis says he is a PoS, then to me that sounds like it should be ok to be a PoS. i am sorry, but it is absolutely not ok.
on the other hand people who assume that they are good, should want to apologize and make corrections if it comes to light that their actions or words had a negative effect on others.
of course there is also the attitude of some people that they can't do no wrong an that any criticism of their behavior is an insult. that's also not ok.
the primary fault with purism here seems to be failure to communicate. the purism project may be well intentioned, but they are lacking resources which could easily be used to explain the delays in handling refunds if they had properly communicated that.
but admitting failure is embarrassing, in other cultures even more so than in ours, and that can get people to try to avoid the problem rather than facing it which can lead to the situation here, however criticism like this is not helping matters either, instead it makes it worse. it is not giving others the chance to correct their mistakes. it is essentially saying: i don't want you to solve the problem, but i want to see you burn. how is that helpful?
this attitude also makes me look at other people the same way which is not good either.
it's also defeatist, and self-depricating, just like the christian attitude that we are all born sinners, and we'll never overcome all our sins. with that attitude why should i even try? i rather believe we are born noble and that we should strive to keep that nobility or try to get back to it if we go astray.
For the record, I agree with you, self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglect.