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Purism is seeking investment from individuals
- andreareina 5y agoThey require that you're an accredited investor, but later note "This is a good faith requirement, since there is no way for Purism to validate your accredited investor status". Yikes. This had to go through legal right? I'm gobsmacked that either they or the SEC think that not checking is fine. What happens if Joe Sixpack buys in?
- fsflover 5y agohttps://teddit.net/r/Purism/comments/om9za4/email_purism_investment_opportunity/h63c59t/#c https://teddit.net/r/Purism/comments/om9za4/email_purism_inv... My guess, though, is that they might be trying to fall under Rule 504 ... where the disclosure and verification rules are more lax. However you can't fall under Rule 504 if the offer is public ... and I think that having the offer on a publicly accessible website is a violation.
- andreareina 5y agoThat explains the "this is not a public offering" language. Going to be interesting to see how this turns out.
- swiley 5y agoSo can I get in trouble for investing anyway?
- OrvalWintermute 5y agoMany crowdfunding sites also have similar language, as most claims of accredited investor status do not actually require you to prove that status. If Joe Sixpack buys in, and made a false claim, that would be on him/her. Some of the previous requirements around accreditor investor status have changed though https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/09/18/sec-expands-definition-of-accredited-investor/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/09/18/sec-expands-defin... https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-191 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-191
- thrill 5y ago"If Joe Sixpack buys in, and made a false claim, that would be on him/her." You would think that would be the way that it is, but is most assuredly is not.
- wmf 5y agoYeah, the SEC seems to almost always treat the investor as the victim regardless of intent.
- windthrown 5y ago> If Joe Sixpack buys in, and made a false claim, that would be on him/her I doubt the SEC sees it that way. The core purpose of accredited investor requirements is to protect Joe Sixpack from opening themselves up to a bunch of liability.
- icedchai 5y agoSeems normal. I remember signing up for some crowdfunding site about 10 years back, and just checking a box to confirm my accredited status. (I didn't qualify as accredited back then.)
- vmception 5y agoif you have zero people that admitted to being unaccredited investors, then you don't have to verify accredited status and can rely on "self-certification" this is the legal term for the good kind of lying but if you want the badge that says "I'm actually an accredited investor!" there are knowledge tests you can take again instead of purely wealth or income tests
- jccooper 5y agoSelf-certification is normal for 506(b) activities (private offerings), but some level of verification is needed for 506(c) ("crowdfunding"). It smells like a 506(c) but they're claiming it's a "friends and family" offering. If it is, then they can do self-certification. I'll presume they have some good reason to believe they can do it this way.
- Aeolun 5y agoWhat the hell. You need to have assets exceeding 1M to invest $1000? I don’t need that to buy any other stock, why would I need it here? Hell, how does it even apply to people not living in the US in the first place.
- stevehawk 5y agoBecause they need you to sit back and go "damn what a bummer" when your investment nets you a $1000 loss, instead of it being something that would want you to sue.
- hereforphone 5y agoThat happens to me all the time in the stock market and I don't have close to 1MM
- ac29 5y agoYou take 100% losses "all the time"? That's the risk being discussed, not taking a $1000 loss on a $50,000 investment.
- teucris 5y agoIs that attitude limited to millionaires? I know a lot of people who have $1000 to invest who are nowhere near having a million dollars in assets.
- windthrown 5y agoNo this is not arbitrary, accredited investors have a specific set of requirements they need to meet in the US: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
- asah 5y agoMulti decade angel investor here: accredited investor requirements are completely normal, including the good faith clause.
- telendram 5y agoWhy does it sound so much like a scam ?
- AlexTWithBeard 5y agoNot sure about the scam, but my bayesian bullshit filter is triggered by the "unlike all the evil for-profit corporations, we're a white'n'fluffy company aiming for the greater good".
- fsflover 5y agoThey have proven this by numerous contributions to FLOSS [0], releasing laptops with kill switches [1] and neutralized Intel ME [2], FSF-approved OS [3], FSF-endorsed phone [4] and so on. [0] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-and-linux-5-13/ https://puri.sm/posts/purism-and-linux-5-13/ [1] https://puri.sm/security/ https://puri.sm/security/ [2] https://puri.sm/projects/coreboot/ https://puri.sm/projects/coreboot/ [3] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed-gnu-linux-distributions-1 https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed... [4] https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/ https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/
- AlexTWithBeard 5y agoWell, in this case good for them and shame on my bayesian filter. I wish I were an "accredited investor according to Rule 501 under the Securities Act of 1933", because from your links it looks like a kind of good I'd be willing to invest in.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoSo what? You're investing to make money. For those purposes, it's much better for you if they are actually as bad or worse than any other company
- wly_cdgr 5y agoSo what? You're investing to make money. For those purposes, it's much better for you if they are actually as bad or worse than any other company. Nobody makes big money actually respecting the principles they claim
- AlbertCory 5y agoThere are already Socially Responsible Mutual Funds with none of this "accredited investor" stuff. Why would you throw your money away on this? You have no idea whatsoever about what they're going to do with it, except some vague high-sounding words. More to the point, you don't know what % of the ultimate profits, if there are any, will flow to the backers and not to you.
- asah 5y agoMulti decade angel investor here: accredited investor requirements are completely normal, including the good faith clause.
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- AlbertCory 5y agoYou gave it away there: "angel investor .. accredited investor requirements" You're in a different ballgame. The other responders here are wondering if someone can get into that ballgame without all the safeguards you went through.
- mmastrac 5y agoAlso an angel investor. Nobody actually checks accredited investor status [1], but early stage investments are so risky you'll have to invest $X x Y investments at an amount so large it's difficult for most people to do safely. [1] Angellist did actually check for this, though it only required screenshots of account balances.
- stu2b50 5y agoI mean this is a terrible investment no matter what. 3% interest that, let's be honest, there's serious doubt as to whether you'll actually see? From an investment standpoint it's the lowest of junk bonds without a particularly high interest rate either. There's a million things with both better upside and safety.
- StuntPope 5y agoI'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.
- chovybizzass 5y agoseriously? 4 years? I was going to order one. Forget it.
- seba_dos1 5y agoFour years ago it did not exist at all - the crowdfunding campaign to develop it started Aug 2017. The final revision only started shipping in December 2020 (the first early batches in Nov 2019), but not all orders have been fulfilled yet because of supply chain issues. Shipping is supposed to resume soon though: https://puri.sm/posts/the-ball-and-supply-chain/ https://puri.sm/posts/the-ball-and-supply-chain/
- The_Colonel 5y agoSilly him. It wasn't 4 years ago, it was 3 years and 11 months ago!
- seba_dos1 5y ago"the crowdfunding campaign to develop it" is the important part.
- programmin 5y agoIt'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!
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoAnd you haven't received refund?
- Proven 5y agoTheir primary purpose isn't to make money, which makes it a very bad investment for a shitty return (3% in interest - do Amazon or Google pay a lower interest on their bonds?). But apparently it wasn't too hard to borrow enough money...this time.
- prognu 5y agoMost of their team seems to have been involved in the RMS witchhunt, despite RMS being one of their vocal supporters. Did they have nothing better to do?
- nightowl_games 5y agoDid this campaign actually raise 4 million from individuals? Wow!
- johnsonyuen 5y agoUnless we can look at their books, it's just a claim.
- The_Colonel 5y agoThe campaign started at 2.5 million from day one which was raised back in 2019 in a separate fundraiser, probably to appear successful. The rest I don't know. Seems like a very bad investment to make, perhaps people understand it as a form of donation/support (Purism does not look financially healthy). But as the other commenter noted, these numbers aren't verified in any way.
- Apocryphon 5y agoIn light of some of the questions here, why does every for-profit company that tries to make money out of open source, and build a substantial brand out of it, turn shady? Some implode over it- CyanogenMod, CopperheadOS, or the bigger ones lose credibility or become a mess of cancelled projects- Canonical, Mozilla.
- Jiro 5y agoBecause the opportunities to profit from open source are limited, and mostly already taken. Any new company is likely to be either a fraudster, or a zealot and an amateur. Neither of those categories is likely to produce something good. (And the open source field specifically is full of zealots and amateurs that don't exist in other fields. And also fraudsters preying on the zealots and amateurs.) Furthermore, a lot of business models require convincing other people to support you, either through investment, or through getting a larger share of your company's budget. This filters out many incompetent businesses, but since open source is free, the filter is poorer It's like asking why the average book in a bookstore is better than the average book on Amazon Kindle--if you don't need to convince a publisher to spend their limited resources on your book, there's one less filter for bad books.
- geofft 5y agoBecause open source is about contributing to a commons, and profit is about having some value that your business can provide that nobody else can. Those are at odds with one another. Either you're contributing that value back to the commons and killing your own profits, or you're hoarding the value and have drifted from your mission. The least unreasonable for-profit open-source companies (e.g., Red Hat) use the labor of skilled developers as the unique value, i.e., anyone can run Red Hat just fine but if you want the world's most qualified people to work on your specific problems you have to pay them. But even this produces a vague incentive not to write public documentation and not to write understandable and easy-to-maintain products. The other way to do things (e.g., Google, Facebook) is to have some business entirely unrelated to the value of your open source and open-source infrastructure things (e.g., Go and React) that make your business better if they're open-source but don't meaningfully make it easier to compete with you. Then there are the companies that realized they didn't actually want to contribute their core product to a commons (e.g., Elastic) or companies that couldn't meaningfully monetize their open-source core product (e.g., Sun, Netscape).
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