I've been considering backing this project too. I'm somewhat sceptical on whether they can deliver and I have my doubts as to whether they will reach their goal.

Firstly, their campaign is dishonest:

How about the Neo Freerunner, GTA04 and Neo900? They are aware of the Neo900 project's existence as I mentioned it to them when filled in the Librem phone survey they put out several months ago. Their hardware design that separates the baseband from the CPU and has hardware kill switches is clearly influenced by the Neo900. I find it rather cheeky of them to claim to be the first.

Their campaign contains buzzwords that don't make any sense. WTF is "IP-native mobile handset" supposed to mean?

Another major concern for me is the lack of prototyping in their product schedule. They talk about one "dev board" and one "production board". Hardware development is not the same as software development. You can't just update a line of code if it fails to compile. Their campaign doesn't tell me that they have a lot of experience in developing this sort of hardware, thus it doesn't inspire me with much confidence. The Neo900 team had Openmoko experience. These guys have laptop experience. Is that really the same? As far as I'm aware, most phone manufacturers produce several prototypes before delivering a final product. I know Nokia did.

Having said all of that, this is the only project I've seen since the Neo900 which closely fulfils my requirements for a mobile phone. It's not explicitly stated what kernel will be used but it is somewhat implied that it will be based on mainline Linux when they say you'll be able to run most GNU/Linux distributions. They do state that they plan to provide patches to upstream projects although there is no explicit mention of the kernel.

My main fear would be if I back it, they reach their goal, but they fail to deliver. $600 is significantly more money than what the Neo900 guys asked for, and for the reasons stated above, I've less confidence in the Librem phone succeeding than the Neo900. It's not everyday I find phone that would meet my requirements. Do I take a punt?