You do realize purism basically made the software from nothing? I mean yeah, the kernel and a few odd libraries existed, but otherwise they were pretty much on their own. It’s amazing they got it to a state where with a few more months of dev time could mean it might be pretty dang fine, in about three years, which is rather small considering the fact that they are a small company. They also told everyone that it’s not perfect yet, and that aspen is for those that are antsy to get one.
Pinephone hasn’t made their own software, and are leaving it up to the community.
I’m not a troll. I’m just somebody who feels ethically compelled to warn you all before I depart. That way after this thing blows up and all of you are down and out at least $599.00 USD I can say to myself, “Well I tried to warn them”.
I realize that from your perspective there appears to be precious little difference between the two motivations. Unfortunately I’m not in a position where I can have a 100% frank conversation with you all about this and even if I was willing have that conversation, I certainly wouldn’t do it on Purism’s own forums.
Honestly given the level of zealotry present here, I doubt anybody would believe me anyway if I went into more detail. Everybody here is so dead set on the idea of this phone, no amount of damning reality will shake the core belief as it seems to be paired with a very sympathetic and understandable form of desperation. On some level I get it. I really do. I’m just as tired of this terrible user antagonistic smart phone ecosystem that we are all forced to live with. But I refuse to be part of a lie or a scam and this Librem 5 project has devolved into both.
As for my job, I’m a problem solver. I write code. People come to me with problems and I code tools which help to solve the stated problem (when possible). I’ve been doing that for the last 20 years. I hate pointing fingers. I am a doer. It pains me that in this situation, knowing what I know, this approach is the best I can muster. Maybe a year from now after this has blown up and its all over but the crying, feel free to reach out to me on reddit @ /u/jaylittle and I’ll be more than happy to explain in more detail.
Until then, take solace in the fact that I’ll be disappearing in short order. Just as soon as my Librem 5 refund clears. Once that happens, I have no intentions of coming back to this forum. What I am doing here is not fun and it’s not entertaining to me in any way, shape or form. It’s an ethical compulsion. Once my ties to this project have been severed, my ethical compulsion will dwindle significantly as it’s no longer my money on the line. Sniffing out the scam will officially become everybody else’s problem.
TLDR: The world is full of decent people, scammers and suckers. What kind are you?
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t entertained. Sorry, but it’s the truth. @jaylittle You’re definitely adding PR value given your style of presenting totally unresearched extreme stretches and baseless accusations (no potential customer at this price point is really going take that seriously anyhow so it’s not like you’re doing any damage). I’m absolutely sure that if you have a valid reason for requesting a refund it will be honoured, but if I were Purism marketing I would just ‘loose the cheque’ for a few weeks to keep this going. After all, no publicity is bad publicity.
Gonna go make more popcorn now…
I love how you trust a company to act in your best interests while simultaneously encouraging them to act against mine for mere comedic value. Your lacking sense of irony is quite stunning.
I would like to see Purism’s communication with the community be like PINE64, which is much more open and direct.
However, we need to recognize that PINE64 has a different development model. It is trying to develop the hardware and it is relying on communities to provide the software, so it needs to talk publicly about every roadblock and setback it encounters, because it has to communicate with its development partners. Another difference is the fact that PINE64 produces products are mostly geared for tinkerers and developers, whereas Purism is aiming more for end users who may not have much technical knowledge. People who buy from PINE64 are more likely to understand what it means when PINE64 says that it has to switch the digitizer and not freak out and cancel their orders.
Purism is facing a very different situation than PINE64. The PinePhone is less of an investment since it only represents 1 year of development and less likely to break the company, since it it just one of many new products. Purism ~20 developers who have been working 2-3 years on the Librem 5, so it needs to be more careful and more reserved about what it says.
Purism has taken a much greater risk, trying to develop a new mobile OS, and investing in components that don’t require proprietary software. Look at the amount of work that Purism has invested in the Linux drivers for the i.MX8MQ vs the amount of work that PINE64 invested in the Linux drivers for the Allwinner A64 and Rockchip RK3399 for its projects.
What you have to think about is whether you support Purism’s goals vs PINE64’s goals, because they are fundamentally different. Purism’s mission is very important to me, which is why I preordered the Librem 5 instead of the PinePhone.
Back to the phone echo issue, none of that discussion seems to focus on what I suspect the cause might be. All they talk about is feedback. I don’t see traditional feedback as the issue, even based on what little I read of that three-month old thread.
Traditional analog feedback manifests as a cascading, increasing tone (microphone/speaker squeal in the audio frequencies), not a faint repetition of speech, two seconds later. For a two-second propagation delay of an actual voice to occur in an electronic system, something entirely different has to happen. Even the Apollo astronauts didn’t experience quite a full two-second delay in their communications between the earth and the moon. Electronic communications travel at the speed of light. It’s possible that the feedback system involving the dev kit includes the phone carrier’s system in the active echo loop. There are digital switching delays (in silicon, not physical switches as most people think of switches), especially in a ‘TDMA’ time-division multiplexing system. There is error correction to retrieve lost packets. Most of that switching takes place in the carrier’s hardware. How to digitally reconstruct a digital voice signal from the carrier’s system is probably a secret that is found in the firmware blobs of each individual phone manufacturer.
Not sure where you live, but these are not mere buzz words in California.
They define the way company operates and it’s legal obligations to the state as well as to it’s shareholders, partners, employees, etc
Oh but this part of that page I found VERY interesting…
Unless previously reported in the annual report, the board of directors has an on-going duty to send a special purpose current report to the shareholders within 45 days when the SPC (1) makes any expenditure of corporate resources in furtherance of the SPC’s special purpose objectives, (2) withholds any expenditures in furtherance of the special purpose, or (3) determines that the special purpose has been satisfied or should no longer be pursued.
To further transparency, the annual report and any current report must be made available on the SPC’s website and upon shareholder request. In addition, the annual report must be written in plain English.
Is this annual report accessible from Purism’s website?
Edit: It doesn’t appear to be. Surprise, surprise!
Obviously, you mistook it for “mission statements” companies usually have on their websites. .
And this is your humble response?
This only shows how genuine your intentions are here.
I regret engaging in the first place.
Good luck with your refunds. Can’t come soon enough
What’s your purpose here @jaylittle?
I really don’t understand you, i’ve read some post you wrote, and basically you dislike purism, that’s fine, but i do not understand your purpose, i don’t like nvidia because they don’t love open source but i’m not in their forum writing how bad they are, i just buy amd cards, and i vote companies with my money.
I don’t know if you are a troll, or you are a legitimate guy who wanna say something, and i don’t even care, they didn’t scam anyone, if a backer is not happy from something can get a refund, so respect their work, and since they made nothing wrong with any customer expecially you, stop feeding this forum with bad feelings as someone else do.
@Tatatirci While I am skeptical about a lot of what jaylittle has written, on this specific issue he is making a good point. According to the explanation by Jeremy Chen at the link that you provided, a SPC is required to produce a report every year, and make it available through its website. Jeremy Chen’s statement is a commentary on the law, and not the actual law, so it is possible I guess that there are exceptions and/or exemptions from this that may apply to Purism. However, on the face of it, it seems that Purism’s annual reports should be available through its website.
As for the rest of what jaylittle is saying, this is how I understand it:
he has some non-public knowledge about Purism that leads him to believe that the Librem 5 project will inevitably fail
he is not able or willing to share this knowledge with the rest of us
he cannot or will not tell us why he cannot share this knowledge
This is open to more than one interpretation, and I am not going to get into any discussion about the relative merits of those interpretations. Obviously, I hope that the project will succeed and I generally take an optimistic view. However, I got burned by the Jolla tablet project. At the time I made the point in a couple of places that patchy communication on a project like this is liable to be heavily interpreted, and opens up a space for speculation and doubt. I hope that Purism is aware of the Jolla tablet project, and is able to draw some useful conclusions from it about how to communicate with crowdfunding backers.
The corporation commission of the state where Purism is incorporated, should provide their Annual Report, probably on its website. Due diligence is always good. But it doesn’t look to me like anything is out of order regarding Purism, other than possibly a lack of information where information should perhaps be shared. And we’ve covered that pretty thoroughly here, nothing new now. It’s not fair nor productive to make unfounded accusations. In earlier posts in this thread, I posted explaining how Purisms lack of information sharing made me feel/think, because others were attacking Purism and asking for refunds and it was good to separate fact from emotion. I said what I said as a supportive customer, to create an example of what motivates people, hoping that someone from Purism might read the post and make different decisions about how they communicate with their customers. And yet those were just feelings. But there is no evidence for many of the unfounded, potentially damaging claims. For what it’s worth, I am not considering the refund option at this time. That’s just my personal business decision, based on the facts that are available to me.
There’s “annual report” and then there’s “annual report”. Clearly the legal requirements differ from location to location and noone can possibly cover all the different rules in all the different locations.
I am responsible for a couple of companies in my own country, and I assume without proof that the requirements are indicative of many countries. The basic annual report is extremely uninteresting (unless you are an investigative journalist perhaps). All the annual obligation is that you confirm that none of the following has changed.
registered office, principal place of business
name and address of each officeholder (director, company secretary)
number of each class of share
name and address of each shareholder
You confirm that by paying the annual fee. Job done. That information is then all publicly available as a downloadable report (from the government and/or its agents).
Over and above that, different types of entity have additional obligations. (For example, the above assumes that the company is not listed on a stock exchange.)
When I ask myself ‘what might cause Purism to go dark on communications, right after announcing a new product release and then delaying shipping’, all I get is a hunch based loosely on very little information. If there are unresolved bugs in the phone that they thought could be fixed sooner but it’s taking longer than expected to fix, several of my previous assumptions might be validated. When you’re in the thick of a potential crisis that you believe that you can resolve but don’t have many answers right now, the best thing to do is to stop communicating long enough to get your bearings, create a framework of how to deal with all of the issues, and then lastly communicate. If you know you’re going to be forced to disappoint people, you tell them sooner rather than later. If you think you can fix things but you need every last minute to do it, you would probably do what they are doing.
My initial fears were that they might have run out of the cash needed to fulfill orders and were potentially hoping to fuel operations expenses by a new product release announcement and in Hope’s of creating a buying frenzy. In my mind, that scenario is very unlikely now.
In my mind, the biggest challenge to getting this product completed, is probably found in getting the phone modem/radio to work correctly. Somewhere in the OSI seven-layer model the manufacturer of the radio says something like “we only handle the bottom three layers. The rest is up to you”. Most Linux coders are very good at the top, application layers. In-between there are one or more layers that most Engineers have never ventured in to. Companies like Verizon and Google and Samsung probably do not even have more than a minimal number of Engineers who need to work on these bridging levels. They solve their issues once and the job is done for a longer-term. Their specialized knowledge is probably not taught in college and may even be considered trade secrets by their employers. Some of my friends who are Electrical Engineers express doubt when I tell them about this open-source phone project. We all know why. This dark casm between the lower hardware layers and the upper applications layers is not a journey to be made by the weak or the beginner, unless you can luck-in to hiring the one-in-a-million engineer who has experience there and who is willing to leave his well-respected and well-rewarded position with Samsung or Google, to defect, to work for an unproven start-up company which has comparatively little to offer them. This leaves Purism with a very tough nut to crack. If they can pull this off, they will have arrived at a very high, very coveted position in the Engineering community and will have changed the world. Until they do get there, I worry, and for good reason. But every investor or phone buyer of Purism knew on some level that this wouldn’t be easy. Now you know why.
