@zak, @thomas.chiantia I’m not sure about the numbers, but I think it’s something around 10 users per month requesting qubes to be pre-installed, I may be completely wrong about that figure though.
But regardless of that number, the way their proposal was written, undergoing certification also meant paying for ‘technical consulting’ services, and the involved costs were :
- 1,000$/month per product to be listed on the website
- 10,000$/month for “conceptual and planning consulting”
- 35,000$/month for “technical consulting”
Also, because one of the above ‘consulting’ has to do with helping to design the laptop, that means they get shared ownership on the design of the laptop, and if we were to retain the ownership on the design, the above priced would have to “increase by up to 200% as fair compensation for the foregone value of the IP.”.
Oh and yes, as @thomas.chiantia pointed out, “give them 2 laptops of each model for each revision, that will not be returned” is already somewhat expensive… but that’s just one of the many costs here. I think there were some other stuff too, like a 10,000$ flat free for providing us with the OEM installation image. And I think that was on top of the existing deal which gives them 100$ per unit sold with qubes preloaded. Overall, not a great deal for a startup company.
Maybe we misunderstood something about the new certification contract, but that was my take away from it, and I believe that’s what everyone at purism understood from it.
so… yeah, like the blog post said, the costs involved are not financially justifiable for us. And yes @zak, the reason for the non certification is not a technical one, but as you can see (I think is pretty obvious from the above) is a financial one. .
@thomas.chiantia I don’t know if @jeff will share the other post he wrote, but other than explaining in details the existing deal with Qubes and how OEM stuff works, I think the core of the data you’re curious about is what I just shared above. Well, his post is plenty interesting but I think I’ve answered the main question here of why we have decided not to get certified.