What'd you think? If you hire an expert to inspect your product so you can show a certificate and further sales, it's resonable for the expert to get paid.

A potential alternative is to arrange a back-end revenue share agreement. Either ink an agreement along with Purism's CPA firm, and/or Purism files Form 8821 granting Qubes as a disclosure designee, sharing Purism's tax returns information with Qubes. This helps confirm the shipped units in a relatively neutral manner, and charge based upon a percentage of the shipped units. Not at all ideal, because Qubes has no control over Purism's business and how much they ship, among a host of other reasons, but I'd like to see this security focus broaden, and would regret seeing perfect cost recovery being the enemy of good enough cost recovery sink the hardware certification that helps broaden the security emphasis.

That's a little disappointing. I understand there's financial costs involved in someone certifying the thing, and I understand that consultant should be paid for their work, but for the sake of having a "flagship" laptop that QubesOS can point to--in addition to the fact that the OS would likely gain greater adoption from being a pre-installed option on a laptop--you would think that Qubes might be willing to eat the cost.

In principle I'd agree, but I don't get the sense that Qubes is exactly flush with cash.

I think bromium does something quite similar to qubes-os , and the enterprize pricing is maybe around $150-$200/yer/user .

If Qubes wants this so bad, they should pay for this themselves, the first couple of laptops. Then if it proves to be a good selling point, others will follow and pay.

Y'know they're a volunteer effort, right? According to https://www.qubes-os.org/funding/, they didn't receive any major funding this year, so if you want progress in this area, you should donate: https://www.qubes-os.org/donate/