Ghosted with no refund for phone - do not trust this company!

@samruthsky,
Customers who pre-ordered the L5 before Feb. 2020 have legitimate grounds to file complaints against Purism with higher authorities when it doesn’t pay out immediate refunds, since it retroactively changed its refund policy to pay when reaching the order in the shipping queue, but you aren’t in that group of customers. I can sympathize with your frustration, but I don’t see the basis for you filing complaints.

It is important to understand that no big tech company with a lot of resources is going to invest in the development of mobile Linux after witnessing the string of past failures, and it is very unlikely that angel investors are going to appear to dump millions into a mobile Linux startup, so there are really only two options. Either pay for no software development and just sell hardware (which is essentially what PINE64, F(x)tec, Volla and Planet Computers are doing) or try to crowdfund the necessary software development which is what Purism has been doing. By its very nature, crowdfunding is risky for the customer, and the product almost never arrives on time if it arrives at all. Look at the history of the Ubuntu Edge (cancelled), Jolla C tablet (bankruptcy and crowdfunders never got refunded) and the Neo900 (cancelled) for examples of what can happen.

Over 20 companies have failed at commercial mobile Linux in the past and many of them were much larger and had far more resources to dedicate to the task than Purism, so we have to understand the challenges that any company faces when trying to pay for the development of mobile Linux. After witnessing the failures of Sharp, Nokia, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla, Canonical, FIC/OpenMoko, Samsung, Palm/HP, Azingo, Wind River, MontaVista, etc., I see this as a structural problem, which is why I give Purism a lot of credit for continuing to work on mobile Linux when other companies have given up.

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