I mean their August 2023 blog post was basically “We were busy, sorry for not posting updates.” So considering you can still normally buy and receive a product from them, they are probably busy again. (or don’t want to write blog posts) Which doesn’t mean Pine64 is dead, just that you won’t get updates.
Imo it’s good that they aren’t releasing another useless product but it’s a shame that the Pine Note isn’t available for purchase now that it has matured. Would have been such a cool device.
I think you are confusing “making another fedora fork for a laptop brand” with “porting a booloader to the device” or “writing a driver for the screen”. Simply put you would not be able to use the hardware without the software. Outsourcing it to the community makes the hardware cheaper but the sideeffect is that the software will be crappy even after years of development. For some reason people aren’t very keen on writing the low level stuff.
If you compare the Espruino smart watch to the Pine64 smartwatch, it’s a night and day difference. My guess is that it’s because Espruino handles the low level stuff and let community do the fun stuff, while Pine64 leaves everything on the community. Imo you need a fulltime developer who actually spends time looking in the datasheet and figuring out, how to properly put the PineTime to sleep, not just people who peek into the docs every Saturday.
However, it is important to keep in mind that to my knowledge no one has ever been arrested for running a exit node in a western country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505009
There links to other occurrences of arrest in the comments.
What do you mean by not being arrested? I would say German police putting a black bag on your head and taking you to their station in the middle of the night is something one could consider an arrest.