That isn't really how it went down, at least as far as I could tell following their updates from the outside.
It seemed more like they ran out of money entirely, and their options were either give up completely and no-one gets anything, or keep working on Sailfish OS to hopefully get new business going, then make a profit in the future that they can use to pay tablet backers back. And they have been paying backers back as promised when they're able to.
I dont look at the situation as charitably. They raised $2,571,262 (479% funded) and spent more than half of it on Sailfish, while running out of funds such that they never shipped the tablets.
The tablets themselves were manufactured by their Chinese partner and even sold on third party Chinese websites. Funders never got their tablets, but other customers were able to buy the same tablets for below what Jolla had sold them.
Jolla was accepting orders until the very end before they decided to come out and cancel the whole tablet effort.
They have since raised over 12M dollars but ostensibly that is not enough to repay the 2.5M they raised initially.
I have no insights into their engineering or technology since I never got to use their product, but as far as business practices go they have constantly scraped the bottom of the barrel.
