At the top of the article you'll see that it's outdated. System76 has firmware hosted on LVFS and has a good relationship with him today. The lapse in communication was simply because Pop!_OS was consuming all engineering time, and we needed more time to get back him, which made him think that we abandoned the effort. He implemented a desired feature that we were concerned about having (disable tracking of downloads), helped us get adjusted to the firmware upload process, and the rest is history. We in turn have helped HP get the HP Dev One on LVFS too. Unfortunately, some people are still trying to weaponize this as FUD against System76.