Actually, it is our problem as customers, because if Purism fails and goes out of business, then there isn’t another company that is going to replace its products or pick up its development work.
Although the HP Spectre 360 has a kill switch for the webcam and several Thinkpads have sliding shutters over their webcams, Purism is the only company that makes laptops with comprehensive hardware kill switches (webcam, microphone, WiFi and Bluetooth). Purism maintains the leading 100% free software distro (according to distrowatch.org’s rankings), and is the only company making new laptops that publicly aligns with the goals of the FSF.
Of the roughly 3 dozen Linux hardware companies in the world, there are only 4 that I know of which pay for any software development (Purism, System76, Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google). System76 and Raspberry Pi F. maintain their own distros and they develop FOSS code for their own hardware (like ec and raspi-config), but only Purism and Google are contributing code that isn’t specific to their hardware, such as Linux graphical user interfaces and user applications.
Purism managed to raise $2.05 million in convertible notes over the last 37 days, so clearly there are some investors who see value in the company. (The web page currently lists $4.55M, but it started with $2.5 million, which I presume was the $2.5M that Purism raised in December 2019.)
I assume that investors look at it this way: There’s about 20 companies currently selling Linux laptops (not including Chromebooks), but there are only 6 companies that custom design their Linux laptops (Purism, Dell, Lenovo, Star Labs, PINE64 and OLIMEX). There are only two that maintain their own Linux distros (Purism and System76), only three that offer new laptops with Coreboot preinstalled (Purism, System76 and Star Labs), only two that offer Heads and verifiable boot (Purism and NitroKey), only two that do any software development (Purism and System76), and only one that offers hardware kill switches (Purism) and only two that offer anti-interdiction services (Purism and NitroKey). When looking at the Linux phone market, there are 6 companies selling Linux phones (Purism, PINE64, Hallo Welt Systeme (Volla Phone), F(x)tec, jolla-devices.com and Planet Computers), but 2 of those are installing Linux in existing phones (Hallo Welt Systeme and jolla-devices.com). Only 2 offer only Linux and are fully committed to it (Purism and PINE64), only 2 run on Linux drivers (Purism and PINE64), only 2 are aiming to eventually use a standard Linux kernel (Purism and PINE64) and only 1 does any software development (Purism).
Given the growing demand for user-verifiable security, privacy and Linux devices in general, there is logic to investing in Purism despite its production problems, because it is doing so much more than other Linux companies.