> (a couple of years after they started taking orders!)

The crowdfunding campaign that was meant to finance the development of the phone was only launched at the end on 2017, estimating shipment to be in 2019. The first batch (of limited quantity, a few hundred devices) to ship materialized in December 2019. Afterwards Purism successively shipped about as many phones as were produced, and due to several reasons (COVID amongst them) it ended up being split into several production batches - last of which contained a couple thousands of devices and was shipped out in 2023. Only then it moved from being "backordered" to "product in stock".

The biggest mishap happened around 2020-2021, when it was already apparent that it will take a good while to fulfill all existing preorders, so Purism started setting delivery estimations far into future - 6 months at first, then 12 months - hoping that it will be definitely enough to handle the existing queue and to deter impatient people from ordering. Except even 12 months turned out to not be enough to ship some of those, and eventually people started getting angry.

> Unless you work there I don't think you can possibly know this.

As I said, I used to work on Librem 5's software (started in mid-2019) and I had plenty of internal insight. Most of that has been eventually communicated outside though, even if in a "too little too late" fashion: https://puri.sm/posts/where-is-my-librem-5-part-2/

While Purism's early communication suffered greatly from "technically it's not lying, we'll just avoid telling you the bad news for as long as we possibly can" syndrome, the post above and its part 1 actually described the whole situation in a fairly accurate manner, so I encourage you to read those. Before that they used to tell you things that were technically true like "we're starting shipping soon!", conveniently omitting things like "yeah we're starting, but it will take us several months to push through the queue even if everything goes right to the plan!". And, boy, things did not go right at all.

> No, the main problem with the project was that they didn't ship the fucking phones.

Except they did. The community at forums even graphed out their progress, doing detective's work with as little information as Purism was giving them: https://forums.puri.sm/t/estimate-your-librem-5-shipping/112... (it's not entirely accurate and ends at late-2018 orders, but let's say it's close enough for the purposes of this discussion - you can easily see early production batches there).

I completely agree that Purism did a lot to destroy its reputation and it was deserved. However, posts like yours are misstating the truth to the other extreme. Purism did develop and produce these phones and invested a lot into FLOSS; it took them several years longer than expected to ship, but they already finished shipping more than a year ago. From some point in time they also struggled with fulfilling refunds. If you ask me, these refunds should have never been promised, as at the point in time when they stopped issuing them the money was already all used on development and production - but they did promise such option, so it's their own fault that people expected refunds to be granted. Regardless, an "uh oh, so many people are requesting refunds that we don't have enough money to perform them" fuckup is still far from "being a scam".

(btw. unless something changed very recently, every person who can't get a refund has now an option to instantly get the ordered phone instead, as they've been waiting in a warehouse for many months now; some aren't interested though)

> Here's a rant by their former marketing director

Well, I believe he's one of the people that should be ranted at.