One of the involved employees was actually laid off while they were at Linux Fest Northwest and Jupiter Broadcasting reported on this in Linux UnPlugged Episode 299 . Librem One discussion starts at 5 minutes, 58 seconds. Lay Off / Purge is discussed at 9 minutes, 22 seconds. This was handled in a very public manner during a major Linux conference and thus this is a matter of public knowledge. This was also verified by Zlatan Todoric as part of his interview on Phoronix . We can't however prove why they they were laid off using publicly accessible information.

We have no public way of verifying the number of current pre-orders for the Librem 5. The last Wayback Machine capture of the crowdfunding page before it was transitioned into a normal product page on Purism's store can be found here . According to that archived page, as of September 24th, 2018 the number of Librem 5 pre-orders was 3929 if add up all the individual and bundle order backer counts appropriately. That's over a year after the original campaign was opened. If we assume the same rate of pre-orders coming in over the last year, that probably puts them at just over 8000 pre-orders. That of course assumes that they are able to maintain a rate of 4000 new pre-orders each year. Some might say that's pretty generous as they got a lot of free advertising during the initial months of the crowdfunding campaign. However I believe Purism has spent a lot of effort on keeping the marketing hype pretty high, so I think it's a fair guess at the end of the day.

While there is no fool proof way to publicly verify this, Purism has started relying quite heavily on obtaining funding from Kickfurther. If you want the full history of their activity on Kickfurther, you'll need to create an account (as most content on the site requires a free login to view) and you'll need to dig into the history of two accounts as they apparently closed the account their original co-ops were run through and created a new one for their more recent co-ops at some point. Long story short: They originally had a co-op in 2016 and another in 2017. After that nothing until this year when they ran one in March, another in April and two in September which are still ongoing.

Given the Kickfurther activity we just discussed, it's is relatively safe to conclude that Purism is suffering from cash flow issues though this is not atypical of a burgeoning inventory heavy business (FWIW I know this because I watch Shark Tank). This conclusion is mostly driven by the fact that effective interest rates on these co-ops are far and above what a traditional corporate lender would ask for. Unless of course for some reason, Purism isn't able to obtain a credit line, hence the reliance on vehicles like Kickfurther and the cash they are pulling in from Librem pre-orders. Finally, Zlatan Todoric stated "entire paychecks were cut during campaign for several people" in his Phoronix interview which lends credibility to the theory that these cash flow issues are persistent.

Now if you read #2, you'll know that we can guess that the best case scenario for the level of Librem 5 pre-orders is 4000 a year. At $600 a piece that gives us a total revenue figure of $2.4 million. Divide that over 12 months and you end up with $200k of Librem 5 revenue per month. If you look at Purism's latest co-op on Kickfurther you'll see that they claim yearly revenues in excess of $6 million. However if you look at the March 2019 and April 2019 co-ops you'll see that they both claim that Purism's yearly revenues were in excess of $3 million.

In either event, assuming our rate of Librem 5 pre-orders is at least 4000 a year, then it seems relatively safe to conclude that Librem 5 pre-orders make up at least a substanial portion of Purism's revenue or the bulk of it, depending on which of those revenue figures you choose to believe. While it is possible that revenue figures from March and April were simply outdated, it seems unlikely since the March co-op was the very first co-op for this new account and the figure was definitely not copied and pasted from any of the co-ops associated with their old account as they have no yearly revenue information whatsoever. This of course begs the question of how Purism's yearly revenue figure could have doubled in a matter of six months even while they still claim the same 100% year over year growth rate.