My main concern with this DIY laptop is if they are mainlining everything for Linux and U-boot. It looks to be entirely open source (due to the use of the NXP/Freescale i.MX8MQ and the work going into that).
This unfortunately happened with the Novena. It was entirely open source, but there were a lot of out of tree patches that had to be applied to get a kernel fully functional. This meant that it was effectively frozen at 4.4 without someone to dedicate a lot of time to port the changes to a newer kernel (I say that as someone who tried, and gave up, to try to port the changes to 4.9).
This unfortunately happened with the Novena. It was entirely open source, but there were a lot of out of tree patches that had to be applied to get a kernel fully functional. This meant that it was effectively frozen at 4.4 without someone to dedicate a lot of time to port the changes to a newer kernel (I say that as someone who tried, and gave up, to try to port the changes to 4.9).