Purism (company)

Purism, SPC is an American computer technology corporation based in San Francisco, California and registered in the state of Washington. Purism manufactures the Librem personal computing devices with a focus on software freedom, computer security, and Internet privacy. In addition to hardware, Purism also maintains PureOS, an operating system along with Librem One, a suite of software as a service based on open standards. Purism was founded in 2014 with the start of a crowdfunding campaign for the Librem 15, an attempt to manufacture an Intel-based high-end laptop for Linux with "almost no proprietary software". A second campaign funded development of a 13-inch model with hardware switches to disable the microphone and camera as a privacy feature. Kill switches were also added to the 15-inch model. The two campaigns raised from 1,042 initial backers, and production began at the end of 2015. In 2017 Purism announced its transition from a build to order to a build to stock order fulfillment model. Purism reincorporated as a social purpose corporation in February 2017 and announced the change in May. Purism manages development of PureOS, a free Linux distro based on Debian. PureOS mostly ships with software from the Debian software repository but has all software removed that violates Purism's guidelines and the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines. PureOS was endorsed by the Free Software Foundation in December 2017. Librem laptops ship with PureOS by default and an optional Qubes OS Universal Serial Bus (USB) drive. Purism says that it is easy for Librem device owners to install alternative Linux distributions and that owners have the freedom to install any operating system that they desire. Librem Librem has been the brand name used by Purism for all of their computer hardware products since the firm's first website in late 2014. The name is based on the French word libre for the English word free as used in the term logiciel libre for free software.