I disagree, and I think that the majority of the people who preordered the L5 would disagree as well. In my opinion, it is far better to eventually get a phone, even if it arrives late, then to get no refund and no phone, which is where your proposed solution of taking the company to court to force it to pay immediate refunds will lead us, if it provokes a chapter 11 bankruptcy or chapter 7 liquidation.
People who preordered the phone have lower priority in bankruptcy proceedings than any banks who loaned Purism money, any suppliers/contractors who are owed money for goods or services, and any employees who are owed back wages. Stockholders will keep their stock if the company is reorganized under chapter 11 bankruptcy, or get pennies for every dollar that they invested in a Chapter 7 liquidation, but people who preordered the L5 are likely to get nothing in a bankruptcy.
Considering the fact that Purism shipped 1200 L5’s in September and October of 2021 and it looks likely at this point that everyone who preordered will get their phones in the next 12 months, I don’t see why you would want to provoke a court proceeding where the backers are likely to not get their preordered phones.
If another company were willing to buy Purism in a bankruptcy fire sale, it would probably look at the 20 previous attempts at commercial mobile Linux which were business failures, and decide that more investment in the development of the Phosh mobile environment is not rational from a business perspective. It is likely to use the bankruptcy as an excuse to drop the L5, and only concentrate on PCs, since they are the profitable part of the business.
Even if the new company makes the decision that there is a market for Linux phones, it will probably decide that paying for software development makes no business sense, and it will lay off most of the 11 people currently being paid by Purism to work on the L5’s software. No other small Linux hardware company pays for software development like Purism, and once Purism is “properly managed under new management” (as you term it), that paid dev work will end.
What that means is that we have to rely on the work of the volunteers to develop Phosh, which means that we face the prospect of slow development, just like we have seen with Plasma Mobile. Remember that Plasma Mobile has been under development since July 2015, so twice as long as Phosh, yet a poll on the PinePhone forum found that 70% use Phosh vs 16% use Plasma Mobile, and a later poll found that 56% selected Phosh as their favorite interface vs 14% for Plasma Mobile.
The 1/4 million lines of new code that Purism has created for the L5 are vital for the future of mobile Linux, because Phosh is the most maintainable of the available Linux mobile interfaces, since it is designed as a thin overlay on top of GTK/GNOME, which has developers paid by IBM/Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Google, and it uses ModemManager, which is much better maintained than oFono. In comparison, Plasma Mobile only has a few developers paid by Blue Systems, and Jolla helps a little with the maintenance of the Maliit keyboard and oFono telephony, so Plasma Mobile has very little corporate support.
The prospects for the other mobile Linux interfaces is far worse. Ubuntu Touch is a maintenance nightmare, and the volunteers at UBports will be lucky just to maintain the existing code, much less add to Lomiri and its apps. Samsung and LG stopped developing Tizen and WebOS for smartphones long ago, and LuneOS based on WebOS is going nowhere. Firefox OS only lives on as proprietary KaiOS. The community has rejected the proprietary Silica interface in Sailfish OS and there is not currently a single phone shipping with Sailish OS preinstalled by the OEM, so it only sold as a 3rd party aftermarket reinstall by jolla-devices.com. I doubt that the Glacier IU for Nemo Mobile will ever be completed, and Hildon, based on GTK 2, is hopelessly outdated.
I don’t like the way that Purism marketed the L5 as if it were ready for non-technical users, and I especially don’t like the fact that Purism retroactively changed its refund policy, but we have to acknowledge that Purism is now shipping phones and it is doing dev work that is vitally important to the future of mobile Linux, which no other company will do.
I don’t know how you can make this kind of crazy comment, considering how the L5 was designed.
The L5 is the first phone with free/open source schematics since the Golden Delicious GTA04, released in 2011. It isn’t hard to verify that the schematics are real, considering that Purism released x-ray photos of the PCBs (for Birch batch), and you can x-ray the PCBs yourself, and see that the parts listed in the schematics match the size and shape of the chips in the x-rays, and you can rip off the metal shields over the PCBs and read the labels on the chips.
The L5 and the PinePhone are the only phones on the market which use 100% free/open source drivers. There is no proprietary code stored in the L5’s Linux file system. No proprietary code ever executes on the four Cortex-A53 CPU cores in the L5, and the only proprietary code that is executed by the i.MX 8M Quad processor is a bit of Synopsys code to train the DDR4 RAM timing during bootup, which is stored in a separate SPI NOR Flash chip and executed by u-boot on the secondary Cortex-M4F processor. At that point during the bootup, I doubt that is even isn’t possible for the code to access your files, which are encrypted on the eMMC. The Winbond W25Q16JVUXIM TR SPI NOR Flash chip only holds 2MB, so the amount of proprietary code has to be small, and it would be very hard to stick an OS in there with a TCP/IP stack and a driver for the BM818 cellular modem or RS9116 WiFi that is capable of communicating with the outside world. Of course, you have the documentation, so you can extract the binary from the Flash chip, and use a hex editor to analyze it to determine if has an OS with a TCP/IP stack or not. You can also compare it with the binary that you can download from NXP to determine whether it has been altered or not.
Purism now hosts most of the source code that it is developing on GNOME servers, and volunteers from GNOME, Mobian and postmarketOS are involved in the development of Phosh, which is a good indication that Purism isn’t deliberately putting backdoors in its code, which you can read yourself. Even if you don’t trust Purism’s software and its compilation of the code, Purism sent the L5 to UBports, postmarketOS and Mobian, so they will make ports for the phone. UBports’ work on the L5 has stalled, but you can try out the postmarketOS and Mobian ports. The postmarketOS port supports Plasma Mobile and Sxmo, so you don’t even have to use Purism’s interface.
Even if you think that there is a backdoor in the BroadMobi BM818 modem, Silicon Labs RS9116 WiFi, STMicroelectronics Teseo-LIV3F GNSS, TI TPS65982 USB PD controller, ROHM BD71837AMWV power management IC, TI BQ25895 charge controller, Microchip USB2642 media card controller, etc., all components in the L5 use serial interfaces that don’t allow direct memory access, and the hardware kill switches make it possible to cut the current or turn off many of the components. You can rip the shielding off the PCBs and take out your multimeter and verify whether the components that have hardware kill switches are really turned off or not.