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
http://jeremychenlaw.com/what-is-a-california-social-purpose-corporation/
LOL - yet this company operates however it wants. We don’t even know who the shareholders are. We only know that we are not one of them.
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.
Thank You
Looks like the first modem emails have been sent out!
This is from a user on the librem one support channel.
@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:
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.
EDIT: While I was writing this, a sign that modem e-mails are being sent has appeared. Yay!
Well, the thing is, Purism is a WASHINGTON SPC, based in California.
Jay is wrong. Surprise, surprise 
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.
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.
To your point , I have some anecdotal experiences.
Traveling across US (rural & Urban) as well as here in SoCal I realized that my Motorola phones were doing much better than others (was comparing in real time same carrier) holding onto the conversation as well as getting the signal out in low strength areas - on average 4dB and more. The only ones that were not excelling as much were Z2 Play and Z2 force.
The brands I had compared with were flagships of LG & Samsung.
As of recently, we learned that even a cheap Moto G6 Play was superior to iPhone X. Same home, same carrier , one is getting calls through the other not. It’s not just 1 phone vs another, but there were other 2 iPhone Xs also failing, in this same place and spot as another Moto (X4) waa fine.
If apple can’t match the cellular radio connectivity of budget Motorola, there has to be more to it than just the money. I know that major disadvantage was not using Qualcomm which perfected it’s craft for US radios , but there were plenty of other Android OEMs who used same chips as Moto and still failed to match it in strength.
Given that L5 comes with modems it has, of course we can be worried how it all works out.
It probably won’t be picking, it will be assembly. The quantity for Aspen won’t merit as much work for picking. Unless it’s picking for assembly, then you have to follow work-orders, which yes, will be tedious. But if its picking for shipment, it won’t be much for Aspen. (It won’t be hundreds of thousands of mini-cookies.)
In addition, if there are any last minute changes, then there will be the re-work, work-orders!
(And yes, I did a like.)
So what I see here is that the report has to be sent to the shareholders, not us.
Next item on the agenda tells me any website posting is done only if the shareholders request it.
My only logical conclusion is that the shareholders have not requested it.
No problem so far. Feel free to continue research. I would look for shareholders meeting minutes, but then again such minutes may not have to be public. Unless Washington State law requires it.
Often (and as you said, it may vary), such reports include a financial statement.
It’s actually really cool that they’re doing that (instead of just saving changes until next version), makes me even more appreciative of those on the line (I’m assuming they have a line)
Cool, what were you a part of making? Tee hee, I did it back when the way to find a job was to look at want ads in the back of a newspaper and I remember reading those want ads on my breaks. Nothing motivates you more than a hairnet
Of which there may be exactly one!
In passing, condition (3) is very unlikely to be satisfied. Whether in the annual report or in a special purpose report, it is most likely to be addressing condition (1).
In addition, someone may argue that existing material publicly available on the web site is adequate to satisfy the requirements arising out of condition (1). It’s not like we don’t know what objectives Purism is devoting expenditure towards (and we aren’t even shareholders).
Not pretending to know US Washington state law but here for private companies there is no requirement to make financial reports publicly available.
The only requirement is that a company does not trade while insolvent. That typically therefore requires the directors to “reasonably believe that the company will be able to pay its debts as and when they become due and payable” or words to that effect.
Board level assembly is typically robotic and inexpensive. I have seen some low cost pick and place machines with arms that move too quickly to track with your eyes. Bottom level pick and place machines start at only a few thousand dollars, although those are a bit slower. So you program your pick and place machines with all of the component locations. Load the parts, and just let things run. The boards go through a solder reflow oven afterward. Then you scrub the boards clean. A few thousand boards can be made quickly this way. Humans make mistakes. If the robotics are less than perfect, the system notifies you and tells you where.
I’ve been working manufacturing since the mid-1980s. Mostly small electronics stuff, connectors, drives, software, sensors, (pressure and fluid).
But I don’t work the floor, I work legacy IT, which drives the biz, so I get to visit all aspects of the process, from selling, to buying, A/P, A/R, receiving, inspection, Q/C, make parts from raw materials, buy parts to assembly, then finished goods, and shipping.
And if they are private and not public, they don’t have to trade at all! (Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.)
