Purism is seeking investment from individuals • Hacker News Board

Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals

#71

Post by tptacek » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #64

tptacek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those other stocks are the result of a multi-year process of disclosure and regulation with the SEC, including quarterly audited financial disclosures, due diligence reviews, and a gigantic mess of filings. Companies pay tens of millions of dollars to get themselves into a position where ordinary retail investors can buy their stock. These people, on the other hand, are just a bunch of people with a web page. You can…

> You can solicit investments on a web page, but only from sophisticated buyers Unless you are selling cryptocurrency or a variety of non-materialized products (crowdfunding). It seems eminently more reasonable to me to be able to invest in an existing company with an actual product.

There is a huge difference between speculatively giving money to a company that may or may not provide you with a product and a company promising investment returns. The amount you'll give to the product company is capped by some plausible valuation you give the product itself, which is virtually always very low relative to your net worth. The same isn't at all true of an investment opportunity; people can and do lose their life's savings chasing sketchy investment returns.

If your point is that cryptocurrency speculation should be heavily regulated and even restricted to accredited investors, you won't get any disagreement from me!

Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals

#72

Post by ianai » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

linmob wrote: post #63

dogma1138 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what Purism does already, they are selling bog standard OEM laptops and now “NUCs” with Coreboot at a pretty high premium. Unlike System76 they aren’t even maintaining a swanky Linux distro like PopOS.

Um, they are maintaining a distro. It’s called PureOS [0]. [0]: https://www.pureos.net

Just to clarify, it’s possible to focus solely on providing drivers for known hardware configurations and across a variety of OSes. Deciding to fork Debian and maintaining a distribution on top of those drivers seems massively unnecessary.

Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals

#73

Post by fmajid » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:27 AM UTC

ianai wrote: post #37

fmajid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before anyone considers putting money there, they should read this interview by their former CTO. Sounds like a train wreck to me: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...

Reading that, I wonder whether a start up would have a better time offering OS/firmware support for already shipping, mass produced devices. i.e. Buy the latest XPS 15 and get to work making an installer that disables all the things they want to disable (intel ME off the top of mind). Doing similar with phone models, etc. I wonder whether this could be done for Windows drivers, for that matter.

Tuxedo Computers does this.

Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals

#74

Post by programmin » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

chovybizzass wrote: post #36

StuntPope wrote: post #20

I'm still waiting for my Librem phone that I pre-ordered and paid for, over four years ago. So, no, I think I'll pass.

seriously? 4 years? I was going to order one. Forget it.

It's worth the wait. A full Linux phone that plugs in as a computer with USBC. A bit buggy right now without camera+gps and too many apps, but when software is ready this should be the future of mobile!