Your defense of them seems to be that they're dishonest, naive idiots, but not scammers. Have I summed that up about right?
This isn't an attempt at a defense for BFL, it's an accurate accounting of what is going on so that people can use good information to make their business decisions. The problem with a lot of the comments in this topic, is that there is no temperament to reality. It's "BFL are scammorz, har har" which doesn't help anyone.
I think that the two key words in the quoted section are dishonest and naive. BFL has shown themselves to be dishonest through ommission about their delivery dates, allowing customers to continue to believe that chips would be arriving in late November when they knew that they were making clock buffer adjustments that would delay at least until mid-December. Because of the competitive environment for ASICs, it is understandable why they would do this, but it's important to know that they did this when deciding whether or not you can trust them regarding future statements. Essentially, if BFL says on January 8th that the chips will arrive soon, this aspect of dishonesty justifies a person to ignore the information until there is provable evidence that the chips are in BFLs hands. I would even go so far as to say the chips need to be integrated into a working prototype, and yochdog and the other guy go there and see it and report positively. Only does it makes sense to plan around a promised BFL shipping date.
The other word is naive and it does seem that they have some experience to gain with respect to business relationships. This is pretty normal for a new company though, and as such I think it is overboard to label anyone there as an "idiot". From what I've seen, the people at BFL are pretty smart.
As far as being a "scammer", I still feel it is highly doubtful that the intention here was to collect preorder money and then run with it with no product. However, I still feel a scammer tag is warranted and I've laid out the case for that here.
It has previously been established that one of BFLs managers is convicted for running a scam defrauding little old ladies for 20 million USD.
I read those documents and I think you may have misunderstood what they said. Sonny was just part of an illegal lottery. People were still paid out. It seems that some people focus on the idea that they didn't buy tickets, but that was a strong feature of their lottery. If they bought tickets from the government, then the highest payout they could expect is half of what they put in. This is because government lotteries are not used as wealth redistribution, but for funding government programs (typically schools). So, instead, they offered tickets with a higher payout that would be validated by the government lottery. The people got paid as according to their voluntary agreements, and they actually got paid much better than if they participated in the government sanctioned lottery.
However, the government HATES it when you muscle in on their turf. The business model is essentially the equivalent of selling book orders in Bugsy Segal's backyard. The fact that they were giving people a more fair game while cutting out funds that should have gone to the public treasury was pretty much infuriating to the AG. That's why the hammer fell. The fraud argument from the government is that Sonny's company was supposedly representing themselves as a sanctioned government lottery. Maybe they were, I don't really know because the document lacked evidence, and the government's motivation is suspect. But this has nothing to do with defrauding little old ladies.
