That is a very simplistic view. Having interacted with a number of the developers and members of the tech support, I would say that they are very honest and hard working people, so it isn’t fair to tar the reputations of the employees with the decisions of management.
I also don’t think that we can judge whether company’s management is “dishonest” without knowing the financial situation of the company. You mentioned the changing of the refund policy as “everything that [you] need to know about them”, but that doesn’t tell you everything. We need to know the financial situation of the company to be able to make a moral judgement about the actions of the company, because without knowing that, it is hard to judge.
We don’t know what options Purism had on the table in February 2020 when Purism changed its refund policy, but it is worth keeping in mind that Purism had to raise the price of the phone in January 2020 and a number of the developers were let go or quit between February and May. In addition, the commit record shows that there were fewer commits during that time period, so it looks like their hours were cut back for the developers that stayed.
Again, I don’t know the financial situation so I may be totally wrong about this, but I suspect that Purism was facing a situation where it feared that it wouldn’t be able to finish the developing the phone because too many people were canceling their orders, but Purism had already spent their money on developing the phone, so it couldn’t repay them. Legally, you can say that Purism should have refunded everyone who canceled their L5 orders, until it was no longer able to repay and it should then have declared bankruptcy and cancelled the development of the phone, in which case all the customers who preordered would probably never get their money back since they have lower priority than banks and employees in collecting owed money. If that were the other option on the table, then I would say that Purism made the better choice. On the other hand, if Purism decided to change its refund policy because it allowed the company to make greater profits that quarter, then I do think the company deserves opprobrium. My point is that you shouldn’t make moral judgements on the character of the people at the company without knowing the facts of the situation.
What we do know for sure is that Purism has been doing some very solid dev work, which no other company is willing to undertake, and 56% of PinePhone users say that Phosh is their favorite interface. Nicole Faerber says that it took about a dozen revisions of the main board in the L5 to get it right, which shows just how hard it is to develop a phone from scratch using a new SoC without a reference design. What Purism is attempting to do is similar to Nokia’s efforts to develop the N9 and Meego, and that took over 2 years for the biggest phone company in the world (at the time). It took 5.5 years of development before Android was released in its first phone (the HTC Dream in 2008).
It is also worth keeping in mind that many companies have failed at mobile Linux in the past (Sharp, G.MATE, MonteVista+Motorola/NEC/Panasonic, Wind River, Palm->HP, ZiiLabs, FIC/OpenMoko, Golden Delicious, Nokia+Intel, Samsung+Intel, Mozilla, Canonical+BQ/Meizu and ARCHOS). Having watched what happened with the Jolla Tablet, where the company went bankrupt and most of the people who preordered lost their money, I think that we should keep in mind how hard it is to build custom hardware and pay for the development of mobile Linux. Of the roughly 3 dozen companies that currently sell Linux hardware, only Purism and System76 are paying for any software development, and Purism does a lot more than System76 despite having far lower volume.
