Pinephone and open source firmware for baseband

[justneedsomedatathanks]

All what I have ever heard and seen is Pine64 is really really careful when it talks about the modem and emphasizes that it cannot officially recommend alternative modem firmware. Pine64 distributes phones only with stock firmware and that is quite clearly said in every source I can find of.
And and in addition to above it is quite clearly stated how Biktorgjs firmware works and even that community build software does not advertise to be completely open source.

I have no idea where those other statements are coming from because as far as I have seen both Purism and Pine64 are very polite - even too polite if you ask from me . I haven't seen an ad/claim from either of them that would directly explain exactly how a phone from another manufacturer works.

As a quick look this looks more like a misunderstanding or even a "competitor" outburst. While this is not bloody battle it is really easy to see that Graphene OS, Pine64 and Purism are all kind of chasing same target group. It is quite heavy argument to say both Pine64 and Purism as scammers.

I can change my mind if someone can show me some evidence of the statements, but right now this looks mostly like a false smear

Pine64 appears to be quite honest. They plaster the store page with disclaimers saying the Pinephone is not a consumer-ready product and give customers the right expectations. The worst I found was an off-hand comment on the marketing page saying the Pinephone is for you if you "work in a security-focused field", which isn't really true because of how far behind Linux is compared to both iOS and Android.

The case of Purism is quite different. Purism doesn't offer refunds, which is something you would reasonably expect if your phone had not been shipped after 6 years. They will only refund your phone after they ship it to you, which could be months or years longer. This is pretty ridiculous. Many people who paid for a Librem phone years ago have still not received it. Purism also does not advertise their phone as the beta product it is, which does not have basic features customers expect from phones. They also don't talk about the battery life. The Librem 5 is a premium product which performs very poorly against any other modern phone and they are not forthright enough about this.

Just look at the Purism subreddit for endless posts from disgruntled customers: https://old.reddit.com/r/Purism

Comparatively, Pine64 only offers the product when they have stock for it. I received my Pinephone within a month. They don't give customers false expectations about the product. The only way I think they could improve the page is by also explaining the battery life is bad, even if that's a driver problem. This is another big expectation customers have for phones, after all.

This is why I was surprised to hear Pine64 had made some false claim they are sticking to. I wanted to know their current position and their reasons for thinking that way.

My intention is not to cause drama and division, but to clear up this misunderstanding (if that's what it is). This is being used as a reason to recommend against the Pinephone in some communities, which doesn't seem right to me.

Edit: It's worth pointing out that Purism has done a lot for upstream. They've done a lot of work on Phosh which makes it easier for other GNOME contributors to work on the project. They've also contributed to organizations like Zemarmot. So as much as I disagree with their business practices, I think they've done some good for GNU/Linux as a whole.