For subscribers of the PureOS Development Fund - Vote with your dollar(s) and demand more transparency from Purism

Software PureOS
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For subscribers of the PureOS development subscription:

This is a post for those who have subscribed to PureOS’s development subscription. If you agree with what you read, please add your support below to show Purism that we demand more transparency in how this subscription model is executed. If you are not a subscriber, please do not engage in this post. If you are a subscriber but do not agree with the demands put forth, please do not engage in this post. Engagement from those who do not qualify diminishes the effectiveness and purpose of this post and harms the goal this post is seeking to rectify.

We, the undersigned, demand more transparency behind PureOS’s development subscription service. We wish to see the following changes in the next two months (Deadline: November 6th, 2024) or we will pull our respective funding from the subscription service that you provide:

  1. We wish to see a specific date designated as “update day” when we are guaranteed that some sort of development update will be published. Last update was published on August 6th, however, we leave the date to your choosing, provided that it is reliably published by this date every month. We are willing to show flexibility in what is published (A short blog/forum post detailing why updates are late and when they are expected to be published) so long as this is well communicated and not regularly relied upon.

  2. We wish for you to disclose how much was raised in each month as part of the update. We are doing our part to contribute towards a tech future that we want to see and we deserve to know how much we are putting towards that future every month. Hiding this information only further erodes trust in Purism. We do not demand to delegate how these funds are spent, only that we know how much funding is being generated from month to month.

We consider these requests to be a reasonable baseline needed in order to maintain trust between Purism and its userbase. For that reason, we will not compromise on these demands. We expect some sort of official communication to address these concerns and confirm Purism’s commitment to seeing these reasonable demands are followed through on moving forward.

Signed,

The contributors of the PureOS development fund

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I am a PureOS Premium ($9.99) monthly subscriber and will permanently withdraw my financial support by the deadline of November 6th, if these demands are not met.

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Another subscriber here. I agree that both of your demands are good ideas, and that Purism should do them. However, I do not plan to withdraw my support in the likely case that these demands are met by silence from Purism.

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The first report was posted on August 6, which is why I assume they chose that day.

As a current subscriber, I agree that more transparency is necessary, however, I don’t agree to this ultimatum.

There have been minor updates pushed in Byzantium, though I don’t know they really mean. I can only assume there is some development happening but monthly reports would help instead of having to check source.puri.sm (imo, GitLab’s UI is a bit of a slog to navigate).

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(I’m also not a subscriber, and I’m aware of your request, but I would like to offer some insight relating to your requests.)

There’s a new post coming. I’m sorry that I didn’t realize you were looking for this exactly on the 6th. US had a holiday early this week which threw dates off a bit.

I will discuss internally the suggestion to commit to a specific date.

We are working hard to improve our communications with customers, as I realize how we have damaged trust by communicating poorly or not at all at various points in the past. In some ways, this is visible broadly (such as the PureOS development updates, which started last month). In some ways it is not broadly visible (improving our support communications, improving ticketing systems, and working toward better issue resolutions).

I’ll raise this suggestion internally as well. This isn’t quite my wheelhouse to make this decision, but I understand your point of view.

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I believe that committing to a specific date could potentially cause issues down the line. I think having a broader range such as within a week (or whatever Purism chooses) would be safer given Purism’s history of providing estimates, missing them, and then receiving backlash. I do understand that estimation is virtually impossible, speaking from experience :wink:.

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I am one of the expert subscribers with the $19.99 monthly, but to be honest, I had an unhealthy lunch of a simple sandwich and fries today and it cost me more than $19.99. Inflation is real, even if sometimes I am stupid with my money.

When I signed up for PureOS Expert subscription, I simultaneously canceled a subscription that I was previously making monthly for the same amount of money to a video game modding website oriented towards an early 2000s strategy game. The rights to the game were recently bought by Microsoft, and despite being a subscriber paying $20/month for quite some time on that forum website, I made a post declaring that Microsoft sucks and per the “SolarWinds” hack there was actually a vulnerability known to Microsoft that they didn’t address – in order to make sure they won the US government contracts – which ended up selling out the US nuclear arsenal and Department of Energy secrets to foreign powers via the hack. So Microsoft is literally selling our nukes for a quick buck and short term stock prices. But when I said that’s one reason Microsoft sucks and so I want to pay someone to make me a GNU version of the game editor for that old 2000s video game (if anyone was interested), so that I can make custom game maps without the aging 20 year old EXE file, the moderators of that site deleted my thread on this topic and then when I asked in their staff contact section for information about why it was deleted, they deleted my question about why. I don’t know if they’re hacked by Microsoft or what, but they can suck it. Now I am donating to Purism instead.

But I never made any demands on those losers on that site, because I did the math one time and figured out via a leak in their API how many users of each tier they had subscribing and it was about $4000/year total, which is peanuts, and it was all just going to some guy who lives in Denmark to run the server, and for the most part I never had a problem with that guy. He’s pretty chill and I have had direct correspondence with him, and I think he is not the secret agent of Microsoft who was deleting my messages off of their site.

So maybe I’m just cheesed off, but I think I’m losing faith in the value of my $20/month, and accordingly I am not in much of a mood to bother to set a very high bar for Purism realistically. I hope for the best, but I’m not sure I expect it.

I’m happy to subscribe to this thread, and I will take your demands into consideration. If you can make a point of where and how it is so absolutely wrong if Purism doesn’t post an update notice at all, perhaps I will consider revoking my subscription, but most likely I will not revoke it.

Instead, I think the demands that we should be making are to have more people like me become PureOS contributors in ways that are actually meaningful. Surely I have heard that more contributors, if the contributions are junk, does not always make software better. But to date, I do not even have an account on the PureOS gitlab, or if I made one I forgot, even though my job professionally is to write software every day (a lot of C++17 and python). At times, I have watched TV with friends instead of fixing obvious and egregious bugs on my Librem 5. And maybe that really is the failure where we should be making demands – that our special power is not a bigger budget than Android or iOS, but the fact that each and every one of us is actually allowed to learn how PureOS works. If we do not learn, and if we do not read this source code, then there is a risk it will have all been for nothing when we end up out-competed by our enemies.

So really the demands we should make are probably on the subscribers, to each contribute a certain number of bug fixes per month, instead of contributing their dollars as pittances in the face of what it takes to move the world forward.

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I would very much appreciate those considerations.

Re: Update day. I was considering this in the vein of Pine64’s community updates. They were all anticipated on the 15th. On the one hand, a deadline isn’t flexible. On the other, I think it encourages accountability that would be well received. Maybe updates via the forum is a reasonable compromise since it won’t require all the polish and process of a formal blog post?

Re: Donations raised. I appreciate that this is being suggested to the right people. I know some people have considered the issue previously that “If we see how much money you raise, people might not be as willing to donate if they think it’s enough” but I don’t personally agree with this mentality. I will donate what I can afford and will continue to donate what I can afford to causes that I think are worthwhile. I’ve never once seen a group asking for donations towards Mobile Linux contributions and thought “Yeah, they have enough…” because most, if not all, are barely scraping by. The statement that I will withdraw my funding is the only leverage I have to try to enable positive change that I feel the community at large would appreciate. Even though it runs contrary to my statements above…

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